


Some nights we open up the flood (Some nights we are lost)

by geoclaire



Series: Where the wild things grow [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - All Media Types
Genre: AU Fic, F/F, Mental Health Issues, agoraphobic behaviour, consider that a trigger warning, listening through the walls, wall!fic, we have always lived in the castle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:59:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4841609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geoclaire/pseuds/geoclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura thinks the apartment next door is empty, until she doesn't. </p><p>Then she gets a little obsessed with the neighbor she's never seen, but knows a lot about.</p><p>(Laura's POV for I held you up and held me in)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Vienna Teng's Never Look Away, which is Hollstein af.
> 
> This fic will include some intense mental health issues. Consider this a trigger warning.

 

The story is all over the news. Playboy William Karnstein, up and coming mogul and heir to the Karnstein empire, wiped out his sports car under the influence and died in a ball of flames.

It’s exactly the kind of story journalists lose their minds over. There’s the usual frenzy over anything the elite do, whipped to boiling point because Will was young and handsome and something of a player. But there’s also the business angle, what will happen to the Karnstein businesses, that let the usually more conservative papers dip their fingers into the salacious bullshit.

That’s enough for the journalists to lose their minds over, but you add in the fact that he crashed the car into the front of the family house and killed his mother in the process, and the story is all over the papers for months. It’s fed by speculation about the future of Karnstein Industries and the sole remaining Karnstein. Pretty Carmilla Karnstein is rumored to have seen the crash that killed her mother and brother, although the lawyers are quick to issue a statement stating she was away at boarding school at the time. They ask for privacy, but her face shows up in photo after photo, long angle lenses capturing her pain and distributing it worldwide.

You know all of this because you read the papers religiously. One day you’re going to be a journalist, and you’re going to do better than this.

 

* * *

 

College isn’t entirely what you expect, and it’s not just the lack of a movie montage of the day your Dad helps move you in. Contrary to expectation, you don’t have a roommate. Your Dad only shrugs when you ask him about it, but you’re in an older building that is usually reserved for second and third year students, and the rooms are all singles.

You figure he thought this way you might go to fewer parties or get into less trouble. And maybe he’s right on that, but you do attend your fair share of parties and meet your share of pretty ladies. You also have a full load of classes and more schoolwork than seems reasonable, and you get a little overwhelmed at first. You have several classes and new friends and a lot of invitations, and you struggle to switch codes so fast and so often, and things get maybe a little out of control after the first month or so.

When you get two Bs and a C on your first papers, you figure you have to work out how to use your time better. And so you stop all the focus shifting, stop trying to do four or five things a day, stop trying to socialise and attend class and write papers and eat well. Instead you start to do things when you have the energy and focus, whenever that happens to be. You move into a new pattern where you binge study, you binge parties, and you binge sleep. You attend all the classes that you can, but your emphasis moves more and more to your readings and papers, because you can do those any time of day or night. And hey, if you’re struggling to understand a particular concept, you do have a pretty good relationship with your Lit TA.

Keepings things ticking along properly takes most of your time and focus. And you’re so wrapped up in it all that strange things happening around you, even the truly bizarre, don’t always register. Danny talks about her lecturer having horns, and you laugh because you think she’s being figurative. Your new friend LaFontaine says they’ve found a former librarian trapped on a USB key, and you raise your eyebrows a little, but hey, information technology is improving all the time, right? Then the campus is infested with giant mushrooms, and you were sleeping at the time, but the number of people allegedly missing from the Drama Club suggests maybe it was as bad as people are saying.

You nod along to the stories, doubting their veracity, but just trying to keep your head above water. You have new friends and new hobbies and a lot of new things to read. You don’t have time to go chasing down every rumour, even if some of them would make truly excellent fodder for your journalism class.

In all of this, that you don’t even meet your closest neighbour for months doesn’t register on your personal scale of kooky. In fact, you don’t even notice that you haven’t met her until the first time you see her door actually open.

Honestly, you don’t really see her. Not unless a blur of dark movement counts;  the door was closing right as you went out. And you’re startled, but mostly because you hadn’t realised anyone lived there at all. That you’ve never seen her means literally nothing; your hours are so irregular now that you sometimes don’t see other people for days at a time, but you’ve also never heard her. And she’s right on the other side of your wall.

You pause outside her door, wondering if you should knock, say hello. But just because you didn’t know she was there, doesn’t mean she didn’t know about you (and you wince a bit, thinking about some of the hours at which you  _know_  you’ve been playing Lorde too loudly). She definitely knows about you.

If she wanted to say hi, you reason, she would have already. She’s had the opportunity. That she hasn’t means she doesn’t want to, and so you step back from the door and progress to your Lit class. You’re already late, and you haven’t been in a week and Danny is bugging you.

 

* * *

 

After that, you pay a little more attention, and you try to keep your music down. It doesn’t always work - writing a history essay at three am essentially requires that you play Taylor Swift to keep your brain functioning - but you try.

You listen for her.

And you don’t hear anything. Not for ages. She’s so quiet that for a while, you think maybe you imagined the whole thing. That you never saw a door close, that the room was and continues to be empty.

Danny quickly quashes that theory for you. “Single rooms don’t stay empty, trust me. They make a bunch of money for the university, they would never just leave one empty.” She paused, looking at the bite of pie on her fork, then put it down. “I didn’t manage to get a single til second year, and someone told me it only became available because the previous owner started raving about bright lights and gods at exam time. They basically changed the sheets and moved me in.”

You had raised your eyebrows, wondering again how your father had managed to get you a single as a first year. But Danny had asked you about your progress on your Wuthering Heights essay, and you’d let the subject go.

But you keep listening, and sometimes, yeah, you do hear her. Not music or tv, like comes from most of your neighbor’s rooms, but her.

Typing is basically the most specific of all sounds, so it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the first sound you recognise as definitely coming from her. It startles you a bit, and you’re not sure why. She lives in the Silas student housing, so obviously she’s a student - she has papers to write, and she has to study.

But once you have that, it’s easier to pick out her other sounds. And they’re little, mostly - the hinges of a fridge, the click of a closing drawer. Running water, from the shower or the sink. And footsteps.

She walks softly, her footfall so soft it’s hard to pick out at all. You wonder if her room, unlike yours, is carpeted, because once you recognise her footsteps they’re very frequent but somehow still very light. As far as you can tell, she walks about throughout most of the day, because almost any time you concentrate, you hear her.

She’s pacing, you realise gradually. She paces about inside and she never seems to leave.

It becomes the most distinctive of her sounds.

 

* * *

 

Danny at first thinks you’re imagining the whole thing, then finds it deeply creepy. Maybe it’s because of how she got her first single room, but once she realises your housemate never comes out, she seems halfway convinced the girl is on the edge of a homicidal rampage.

“I mean, normal people don’t stay inside all day, every day. How can she even keep passing her classes?” She wonders aloud, and you shrug.

“Probably there are electives with minimal facetime. Or maybe I’m wrong and she has tutorials at five in the morning, I’m not always awake.” You say.

Danny laughs. “Yes you are, Hollis,” she says. “I have gotten far too many crack of horrible o'clock texts from you to not know that.”

Yes, but. “Yeah, but not every day,” you argue, and now you’re confused because originally you were the one convincing her that your neighbor never goes out.

Danny pulls a face, then she shrugs. “I don’t know, Laura, but if you’re right and she never goes out at all, then maybe you should be careful if you ever do see her around. It might mean she’s finally cracked.”

You wince a little, and hope like hell that whoever your neighbor is, she isn’t listening.

 

* * *

 

School gets busy for a while, and you have less time to see Danny, and less time to ponder the girl on the other side of the wall. You don’t do parties for a couple of weeks, studying and sleeping and studying more, and churning out papers at a rate you find either depressing or impressive, depending on how many hours it’s been since you last saw food.  

It does make you wonder how your neighbor manages to eat. The cooking facilities in your rooms are lacking at best, and while you can about make yourself instant noodles or cocoa, you’d end up with scurvy if you didn’t eat at the campus outlets or order in a dozen times a week. You’re currently living off cookies and grape soda, with an occasional option on pizza when your weekly stipend comes through. If your housemate isn’t doing the same, she either has the world’s biggest stash of trail mix in there, or she’s a vampire.

When you do finally see Danny, it ends up answering a few questions. When the worst of your deadlines pass, you go over to hers for a Netflix session that ends with you making out on her bed for at least half of it. You also fall asleep through a solid proportion of Battlestar Galactica, and Danny lets you sleep through the miniseries before rousing you and insisting on walking you home.

She kisses you at the front door, sweet and chivalrous and clearly trying to not pressure you by kissing you at the door to your room or asking for an invite upstairs. You appreciate that enough that you spend a fair bit more time kissing than either of you planned, and you’re shivering by the time she smoothes your hair back and kisses your cheek before she leaves.

You go upstairs, fumbling through your pockets for your key and hoping like hell you didn’t lose it somewhere in Danny’s sheets. You’re so intent on finding your key and not freezing to death that you all but trip over three boxes in the corridor.

“Hell and Hogwarts,” you swear, narrowly catching yourself on the opposite wall. It stings your hand, and you’re ready to kick a box in sheer pique, when you realise where they are.

It’s two on a Wednesday morning, and there’s three boxes stacked outside your invisible neighbor’s door. Delivery boxes from - you peer a little closer - a grocery chain you didn’t think was even in this town.

So. Your mysterious housemate does exist, and does eat, and can apparently get people to deliver her food at frankly bizarre hours of the morning.

You squint, thinking. Does this contribute or detract from the vampire theory?

If you were clever, or a bit more committed, or frankly just less freaking tired, you’d probably use this opportunity to stake out her door and see her actual face. Instead you finally pull your key out of your pocket and fumble it into your lock, before staggering towards the bathroom and your bed.

You’re in your pyjamas and about to settle down when you see the eight packets of cookies still stacked beside your desk. You weren’t kidding about living on those; one night you’d found a box of your favourites on special from Amazon and had hit the ‘one click buy’ faster than you could think about your credit card statement. They’d been amazing for your first four essays, but you think you’ve finally discovered the point at which one overdoses on chocolatey goodness. And the walnuts keep sticking in your teeth.

For once, you don’t overthink it. You just grab two packets, jam your feet into your owl slippers, and trudge next door. You balance the containers of deliciousness on top of the boxes, and then do a double take and re-read the name on the address label.

_C. Karnstein._

Oh.

 

* * *

 

Okay, so.

You know there were rumors, a while back, that Carmilla Karnstein had left town and gone to rehab. Well, gone or been committed forcefully, speculated the papers; chatter about the life of the _sole surviving Karnstein_ clearly moved editions, whether or not it had any basis in truth. Probably university was too mainstream to sell papers.

On reflection, there were also on-campus rumours that Carmilla Karnstein was attending your school, but since it was mentioned in the same breath as the mermaids in the lake and the tolling of the faery bells, you didn’t think anyone was serious about it.

Maybe they weren’t, though. Your neighbor is super quiet and super private, and it seems pretty unlikely she’s been abducting first years during social events. Plus, you’re pretty confident that if she was stashing a harem of women in her one bedroom apartment, you would not have needed to doubt her existence.

Rumors are notoriously inaccurate, but it seems like it’s just a bizarre coincidence that Carmilla Karnstein is exactly where campus rumor claims. You’re her closest neighbor, and you have literally never seen her. The chances that the Alchemy Club have some kind of inside knowledge on her activities are vanishingly small.

None of this stops you from casually initiating conversations with anyone you’ve ever heard make any mention of Carmilla.

You confirm quickly that the Alchemy club knows literally nothing about Carmilla Karnstein except what was in the papers: that she’s gay, pretty, and mysterious. You already knew all of that, and keep looking.

Naturally, she isn’t a member of any other clubs. There is no evidence she’s ever been to any of the clubs where she apparently kidnaps nubile young women (and there are no women reported missing). You don’t have access to class lists, so you start scanning group assignment lists and message boards in case you see her name. You check the message boards in your apartment block in case her name comes up. You get nowhere.

Your many and varied efforts get you such a comprehensive lack of results, you even contemplate asking your RA Perry for the student list for the block, just to see if C Karnstein appears on it. You’ve halfway talked yourself into doing it, when you witness Perry terrorizing a senior for microwaving something without a lid. And yeah, no. Probably there are better ways of confirming that one Ms Karnstein attends your school.

And eventually you stumble into one.

You’re in the library around sunset, trying to borrow books for your philosophy elective, but you’re struggling. It seems like every book you could possibly use for your topic has been loaned out, and many of them are weeks and weeks overdue. This is despite the frankly punitive system of fines you know the library issues for overdue books, starting at ten dollars a day and graduating to cell samples.

But you need at least one reference, even if the sun is going down and the librarians are all starting to look even twitchier than usual. So you wander over to the main loans desk, and ask an assistant for help trying to find something relevant to your topic. You tell him the topic, and he nods and starts typing into the search window on his laptop.

He adjusts his glasses when the computer beeps, and peers at the screen. It won’t stop scrolling on its own, and he has to keep pulling back up to the top of the page, but even so, you see the lines of red after every book on the screen.

“I’m sorry, Ms Hollis, it seems like none of the books are available at this time,” he says primly after a moment.

You scowl. “How can none of them be available? Like seriously, all of them are gone? Every single book on determinism has been taken out at one time? No one else in my class is even using this topic.” You lean over the desk, trying to get a quick glance at the screen, and he pulls it away from you. Okay, fair enough, privacy and all that, but - “Doesn’t a red date mean the book is overdue? How can they ALL be overdue?”

His nose twitches, and he takes a deep breath. “It appears that all of the books on determinism are on loan at this time.” he says tightly. “We of course do our best to have late books returned, however it is not always possible to achieve this within a reasonable timeframe.”

The main door slams, and you both jump, the assistant making an oddly goat-like hiccup as he does so. He looks frantically at his watch and then out at the sun, before turning back to you. “I’m sorry, Ms Hollis, we won’t be able to find you anything this evening.”

And he flicks down the lid of his laptop and trots off, not even waiting for you to reply. You might imagine it, but you think you see him drop to all fours as he rounds the nearest shelves.

He’s put the computer lid down, presumably putting it to sleep. But you really do need a book, so you don’t think too much before pulling it towards you. Maybe if you just find out who has all the books - if there’s anyone in your class you can maybe borrow one from - you can get a book for long enough to write your damn paper.

You pull the lid up, and the screen shows the computer is shutting down. But the search window is still visible, and when you glance at the list of borrower’s names, the name you’ve been searching for leaps out at you.

Carmilla Karnstein apparently has an extensive interest in determinism.

 

* * *

 

You tell all of this to Danny one night. You’re cuddling in her bed - the summer society rooms actually contain doubles, which you’d be more bitter about if the members of the summer society weren’t uniformly at least a foot taller than you - and talking quietly about what’s kept you so busy lately.

She hears you out, lets you describe how you’d accidentally found out your neighbor’s identity and then run all over the campus trying to get some kind of confirmation that Carmilla Karnstein actually attends your university. You keep back the details on how it’s been cutting into your course load, and you’ve missed a couple days sleep again. Danny has a tendency to worry, and she’s been a little overly concerned about your schedule.

When you get to the part about Perry, she laughs. But she doesn’t like you being in the library to begin with, and when you tell her how you’d gotten to see Carmilla’s name on the library files, she’s straight-out disapproving.

“I mean, I understand wanting to get a book for your assignment, but seriously Laura, you went out of your way to breach people’s privacy. And you know being in the library after sundown is all but inviting something horrible to happen.”

You squirm a little, knowing Danny is right. And yet. “But I also finally managed to confirm Carmilla - THE Carmilla Karnstein - goes here. And is my neighbor. That’s a pretty big deal, right?”

She rolls her eyes, and rolls onto her back. You’re still pressed into her side, and you cuddle a little more into her. “Yeah, but if you’d just asked me, I could have told you that.” She says, and your head comes off her shoulder on automatic.

You climb a little more on top of her, your stomach now against hers so you can see her face. “I’m sorry, you knew Carmilla Karnstein goes here?”

She pulls a face, skin between her eyebrows wrinkling. “Yeah, I mean I didn’t know she was your roommate, but I knew she went here.”

You’re reeling. “Danny, seriously, how?!”

She shrugs a little. “All the arts TAs share a staffroom. She’s in my friend Mel’s philosophy tutorial. Apparently has never come to class but submits all of her essays online, which is also against policy, you know.”

“I know,” you say distractedly. You’d missed handing in a hard copy of an assignment once, and the warning notification you’d gotten from the Dean ensured this was not something you were going to be doing again any time soon, even if you weren’t sure what an elven wolf even was. “Jeez, how did I not know about this?”

Danny shrugs again, but this time she seems more tense. She sits up a bit, leaning more against her pillows, and you have to pull away to keep upright.

“I don’t know, it never came up. It’s not something I’m that interested in - she isn’t,” she specifies after a moment.

You don’t get it. “How can you not be interested? She was all over the papers for years and now she just mysteriously shows up here and you don’t care?”

“I’m just not,” she says shortly. She sees the look on your face and expands, “I’m not a journalist, Laura, I’m a literature major. I wasn’t that interested in the scandal and I don’t really care what some poor little rich girl is doing locked away in her dorm instead of attending classes like the rest of us plebs.”

Whoa. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” You ask a little helplessly.

She simmers down a bit at your tone, sitting back. “I don’t know, it honestly isn’t something I spend much time thinking about. Mostly I just think it’s creepy she hides away in there and doesn’t talk to anyone like an extra from  _We have always lived in the castle_.”

On Danny’s suggestion, you’d read that a month ago as an additional text for your lit class, so you get the reference. You’re horrified. “Jesus, Danny, she’s not the one who killed her family!”

“That we know about,” she says darkly, and she won’t talk about Carmilla with you any more.

 

* * *

 

Probably it’s just that you know she’s there now. And certainly, now you listen out for her. But it also seems like she’s louder now, somehow freer to make noise.

Well, not that she’s ever loud, per se. It’s more that, now you know for sure she’s there, you’re more able to link the occasional night time sound to her, and to try to figure out how that links into her life overall.

She types a lot, more than you’d noticed before, and you figure it’s just that yeah, even she is affected by the time of semester. She’s got papers to write and reading summaries to submit, even if she doesn’t attend the actual classes she should be doing the readings for.

She also seems to feel real vehemence about those classes and their attendance requirements. Or at least, it’s the first time you hear her absolutely-for-certain say something that you can both hear and are sure is her.

Because she does talk to herself, softly, when she thinks you’re not around. At first you assume she’s on the phone, but gradually you realise that the conversations are too spread out, end without any resolution, and are at all hours of the night. She’s talking to herself, probably without realising she’s doing it.

Over a couple of weeks, you notice it more and more, maybe because the both of you are sleeping less as mid session exams approach. You think that possibly the university is taking the opportunity to put some pressure on her over the classes she doesn’t attend, because that’s the first thing you specifically hear her say - “For God’s sake, like i need the opinions of a roomful of teenaged dimwits to help educate me.”

You’re writing an essay on ethics in journalism, but your head comes up at the first word, and you laugh without meaning to. Unfortunately, it means she immediately goes silent.

You want to put a hand to the wall and apologise. Tell her, quietly, that she doesn’t need to hide her presence for your sake. But you can’t quite find the nerve, so you go back to typing up and deleting chunks of your essay in bursts.

Eventually, you hear her moving around her room again. She doesn’t speak again that evening.

You realise after a while that some of what you think is her being deliberately silent is in fact her sleeping. She sleeps a lot more than you, not that that’s saying something - your sleep patterns have gone from erratic to completely insane with all of your due dates, and Danny would have a fit if she knew how much of your lit essay was written between three and six am.

But Carmilla, she sleeps a lot, and she particularly sleeps a lot during the day. Sure it’s university, but she doesn’t attend the parties that are responsible for most students shifting their sleep patterns to those of the undead. Carmilla just wanders her room, pacing about or reading, til the wee hours of the morning, and then lies in bed sometimes until lunch time.

You can hear her breathing, and sometimes you’re sure she’s not sleeping. You figured out after a month or so of listening to her that her apartment is like a mirror of yours, her bed just the other side of the wall from yours. Some nights, when you’re too revved to sleep or just too overwhelmed by everything that is Silas, you sit and listen to her breathing.

(If you told this to Danny, she’d probably think you’re the one creepy enough to belong in a Shirley Jackson novel).

You pay attention, and eventually you think you know her breathing well enough to tell when she’s asleep, and when she’s just lying there very, very quietly.

You think if your whole family had died, you wouldn’t have much to say either. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter that made roselupus blush.
> 
> With some tiny shoutouts to other fics, speak up if you spot yourself.

Contrary to what Danny says, you don’t stop going to class. You miss tutorials here and there, and there’s particular lectures you haven’t attended in weeks, but you still scrape in to attend more than 73.4% of your classes, as required by the Silas handbook to pass.

Seriously. You went and found LaFontaine, solely because they were the best person you knew for making the rules work for them. When you explained that you were trying to figure out how many classes you could get away with missing, they'd swung an arm around your shoulders and told you they were proud for having finally managed to corrupt you.

They were the one who knew the stats on how many classes you needed to attend, and - more concerningly - how many you could miss before the Dean would start personally checking in on you. Since that's a wholly terrifying concept, you'd embraced their math wholeheartedly.

You needed 73.4 percent attendance to be allowed to pass, but the Dean started checking in on people (read: terrorising them back to class) at 75. You sit down with Laf and the two of you count every class you have attended and every class you could attend all semester, and work out exactly how many more you have to attend to avoid either flunking or unwanted visitations, with a built in margin of error in case you get sick.

With your early semester attendance, you're currently pitching 78 percent. So time-spent-kissing or not, Danny can deal with it.

(Danny is not dealing with it.

But Danny’s cadences lately are reminding you more and more of your father, and that only seems like one more reason not to go to class.

((You are not avoiding her.))

It’s possible that Danny would be happier if she knew where you were when you were not attending class. Maybe if she knew you weren’t entering the fire breathing contest, or joining the Demonic Glee Club, or stalking the minotaur for extra credit, she’d be happier.

Lately, she seems particularly concerned for your safety. So maybe you should tell her that what you’re doing, mostly, is lying quietly in your room and listening out for Carmilla.

(You don’t think that would make Danny happy at all.)

 

* * *

 

Carmilla has been more active lately. You don’t know why, but she seems to pace less and walk about more, which seems contradictory but isn’t. When she paces, she’s monotonous and flat footed, and she paces for hours. Lately, there’s less of that, and more of a louder, springier step that comes in short bursts. Her footsteps sound less like a metronome and more like she’s moving between things she’s interested in.

Maybe that’s it, that something new has caught her attention. You do hear her talking herself quietly through what seems like it could be a math proof one afternoon, which is unusually specific for her. Granted, it could as easily have been a Ponzi scheme or a magical spell for all you know about math, but whatever it is, she does seem more engaged lately.

On the other hand, it could just be the weather. Silas has been experiencing an aseasonally warm period, and when you lie in your bed in the afternoons, listening to Carmilla move around, the sunlight drifts slowly over the length of your bed and your body. You find it comforting, and sometimes you fall asleep until the alarm goes off to send you to your evening classes.

One time, it isn’t the alarm that wakes you, and it takes you several minutes to figure out what the odd, wood scraping noise that woke you could have been. Maybe Carmilla’s moving furniture, or maybe - your heart leaps into your mouth - she opened her window.

You leave early for class that day, and you take a good five minutes circling around the back of the building and counting upwards til you figure out which window is yours, and then hers. The TARDIS mug you’d left on the window sill to help you spot it is less helpful than you hoped.

Or maybe it’s just that you don’t want to admit when you see it the first four times, that you were wrong, and her window is still closed.

 

* * *

 

One Thursday night, you get confirmation that Carmilla is indeed being more active than you had previously observed.

For one, you hear music coming from her apartment for the first time. It drifts in and over you while you’re doing your lit readings, so soft you don’t notice at first. And then it’s so atypical that you don’t realise where it’s coming from for a good half hour.

It’s only when you realise the music playing contains violins and cellos that it registers as unusual, that you cannot remember another time you’ve heard classical music playing in the student housing. Only then do you sit up, cocking your head to confirm what you think you’d heard. And yes, it’s coming through Carmilla’s wall.

Huh.

Maybe she has been doing better. Classical music is meant to be good for, like, your brain, and your stress levels, right? This is a good sign. You nod, and turn back to your book, and hope she’s doing better.

But she also seems unsettled, because you can hear her prowling about again. Not the pacing, and not the talking to herself, and not confident steps about her room. No, this is more like drawers being opened and closed, the bedding tossed about, papers being adjusted. A drink being poured and then not drunk, a short burst of typing before a laptop lid is slammed.

You’ve stopped reading now, your head cocked to the side. And after a bit, you work it out: she’s fidgeting.

It's pretty atypical. Carmilla is ever present, it's true, but she's also the kind of quiet that made you doubt her existence for two months. Mostly she prowls stealthily about, and bar her pacing sprees, doesn't seem to move. She is not someone you would call jittery, or remotely inclined to fiddle, and it seems oddly out of character.

You think probably she’s not aware you’re home at the moment, and that maybe that’s part of it. You’ve only been reading today, you woke up late and didn’t really see the point in showering or getting dressed, so you’ve pretty much just been catching up on your readings in your pyjamas for most of the day. Carmilla woke up late even by her standards (she had a bad night), and you’ve been pretty chilled out ever since, so probably she thinks you’re not home.

You doubt she’d be this active if she thought you could hear her. Even now, her music is on the very borderline of audibility; she may be awake and fidgety, but she still doesn’t want to be noticed.

But you can still hear her fiddling about, turning pages and tapping her fingers. Eventually, she sits down on her bed, and even that’s louder than usual - she’s moving about, the bedsprings singing softly under her weight. She sighs.

You wonder what it is that has her unsettled. A bad grade, or something she’s read, the time of month.

She is just through the wall, less than a metre away, and you have no way of knowing what it is that upsets her. It’s an oddly distressing thought, and you try to divert yourself with your reading again.

You’re distracted, so it takes you a little while to notice when her noises change. You notice that she quietens down, sure, but it’s not until you reach the end of the chapter and reach for a highlighter that you realise that the sounds of her moving about and her breathing are, well, different.

There’s a kind of slipping noise, like she’s rubbing her hand rhythmically over the sheet. She does that sometimes when she’s trying to sleep, and you think she finds it calming. But now it’s accompanied by the occasional squeak of the bedsprings, like she’s still unsettled and moving about.

And her breath is softer, rhythmic, but she’s also making this noise like her breath is catching in her throat. You frown, and lean closer. This is all new. She’s been out of sorts, is she crying?

And maybe it’s just that your ear is all but pressed against the wall now, but there’s another slipping sound and you hear what could be the lowest of moans.

Oh.

Ohhhh.

Oh, holy shit, there is literally no way you can move right now without her hearing you. You gulp.

Okay so you - you can’t listen, right? Sure you’ve been listening to her for a while without her permission, but there are lines, right? Lines, and boundaries, and oh my god you can’t move without her hearing you.

You look around frantically for your ipod. It usually takes you several minutes to find it, your room is clean but disorganised and an iPod is small, but for once, it’s immediately obvious - balanced precariously on your desk chair, a good four metres away. That is not going to help you.

There’s another possible-moan, and you blanch and do the only thing you can do. You pick up your yellow pillow and plant it firmly over your head.

There, no more accidentally overhearing your pretty neighbor masturbating.

Oh sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, why did you think that?

Now you’ve thought the word, it’s not going away. And now you’re thinking about it, a little. Not because you want to - clearly! - but probably because you’re literally hiding your head under the covers trying not to hear Carmilla’s response to touching herself. You close your eyes, like it will help get rid of the image that’s made itself firmly present in your mind: the youngest Karnstein, lying back on her pillows, hand located down the front of her unbuttoned jeans.

How do these things even happen to you?

And now you feel guilty. Sure, you didn’t know she was going to do that, and you certainly don’t want her to know you heard her, so you can’t actually leave. But thinking about her as she does it? That’s a hell of an invasion of privacy.

You do your best to calm your breathing, that you hadn’t realised had sped up, and think about hockey. That’s what you’re meant to do to calm down, right? You read that somewhere.

Probably you’re meant to think about stats, but you don’t know any hockey stats, so you just think about hockey on the whole.

Like, shoulder pads. And pucks. And the noise a puck makes as it hits the back of the goal - Okay, this is not helping.

You yank the pillow off your face with frustration. What exactly are you meant to do in this situation? Just lie here and listen to Carmilla get off?

You get stuck trying to think of a better option, overly aware of the noise Carmilla is making in the next bed the whole time. And probably you wait too long, because her breath catches in her throat and she makes that moan again and then you think she says, softly, “Laura.”

Time slows down. Ice collects in your shoulder and spills down your back and into your belly.

You're wrong. You must be, you've just misheard. Because she can’t know you’re here. You were so deliberately quiet and she wouldn’t do that if she thought you were there and oh god, she’s not trying to talk to you, she’s just thinking about you when she - your brain stalls.

Maybe it’s another Laura?

You cover your face with your hands. You can still hear her breath, rasping a quicker pattern now. You narrowly remember to suppress your groan.

So, your apathetic, closed off, silent roommate? She knows you exist. She has some idea who you are. She even knows your name.

 

* * *

 

You start going to class again. All things considered, you really need somewhere else to be right now, and where better than the classes you should be attending anyway, right?

But somehow, historic journalism and the philosophy of identity don’t hold your attention as much as they once did. It could be that you managed to get a B on the determinism paper you didn’t manage to get a single resource on, and it’s affected your opinion of the value of the class.

Alternatively, it could be that you now associate philosophy with Carmilla, and your subconscious has overlain an image of Carmilla on every slide the lecturer brings up.

Usually they’re just the images from the original papers and news coverage, media you looked up while trying to decide if Carmilla was a figment of your imagination. Sometimes, though, they’re wholly constructed depictions from the depths of your subconscious, which is apparently a little obsessed with the idea of her moaning. Those are distracting.

You attend classes for three days and don’t retain anything, despite the copious notes you’ve taken down in the neatly ruled notebooks your father bought you. Because all you can think is _she said my name_ and that she knows you're there. It's kinda messing with your concentration.

But you knew that, didn't you? Carmilla doesn't speak to you, but she responds to your presence. She's quieter when you're loud, moves about less when you're home and when you're sleeping. When you stayed home for a week to listen to her walking, she was calmer, softer, like the sunlight sinking into your bones warmed her too.

You don't speak, but you're aware of her all the time. Even if you're not home, you're thinking often of what she is probably doing. You know when she's reading, when she's sleeping, when she's showering. You know when she has bad nights, when she wakes up from nightmares, the sound of her frightened breathing. You think you know, probably, what has her jerking awake.

You know her movements better than Danny's, and that alone feels like it's some kind of a problem. You're on opposite sides of a dividing wall but it feels like you're conducting the slowest and most distant of dances.

You think maybe you are a little too obsessed with your neighbour.

You don't go home for a couple more days.

 

* * *

 

Danny catches you after an English class that you’d spent too much of in a wholly different zone. For all you remember about _The Yellow Wallpaper_ , you might as well have stayed home and listened to the lecture recording. Heck, you could have read the book.

“Are you alright?” she asks, and you’d be irked but you're feeling guilty already; you didn’t say a word in that tutorial and you know you look like shit. Even by your standards, you’ve gone too long without sleep.

“Yeah, I just, I don’t know, I’m not sleeping well,” you say, and she frowns.

“Too long a Doctor Who marathon, or are you struggling with the reading?” she asks, and you want to smooth the worried crease between her eyebrows, so you tell her what she wants to hear.

“Ugh, you got me. I’m just conflicted over his relationship with Rose, I had to re-watch and re-examine how he talks to her in the middle season arc.”

Danny rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. “Hollis, I was there when you identified an episode from a single paused screen in the Society common room, I’m pretty sure the last thing you need to do is re-watch the show.”

“But I was looking for different things this time!” you protest, and it's automatic, and now you relax a little, because she believes you.

“Okay but I am expecting you to put in at least that much analysis on your next paper,” she says, and you roll your eyes back at her, but you take her hand when she offers.

“Mmm, about that,” you say, and she raises her eyebrows but she’s amused.

“Yeah, I saw you nod off in the second half. Wanna grab pie and I’ll talk you through it?” she offers, and she barely waits for your nod before she’s opening the door for you.

 

* * *

 

The pie date helps, some, the space that's been developing between the two of you. It certainly helps your essay.

But you still have a neighbor who you can't stop thinking about, and whose story you want to know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one you've been waiting for, where we catch up with I held you up and held me in.
> 
> Or: the one where things snowball.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit, this is literally the longest chapter of anything I've ever written, which is like half of why it took forever. It's nineteen pages long for chrissakes.
> 
> The other half? eh, you'll figure that out.

University is meant to be a time of learning. What you've learned lately is that you're not much good at projecting stability.

And maybe that's because you aren't really most people's concept of stable. But you've been more functional lately: you've attended more of your classes, approximated normal meal times, seen Danny semi regularly, and even started sleeping in your own bed again. That one took a while, a good couple of days of you considering moving in with LaF or simply hiding in the library basement rather than going home, but eventually your phone ran out of battery one too many times and you stopped being willing to wear one pair of jeans until they fell off you.

(Your father has you in the habit of carrying an extra t shirt and a lot of underwear anywhere you go, so you had some leeway. But hiding out temporarily was one thing, never going home again lest you hear your roommate jerk off again was another entirely).

So you're back into your typical schedule, attending some classes and writing essays very late at night.  You'be also been trying rather hard to pay less attention to the presence of one Carmilla Karnstein, with mixed results. She hasn't said your name again, and any time - well, the one time - you thought you heard her start something more intimate, you'd leapt up and tried to divert your own attention. With the dishes. And clearing your desk, and emptying the bin, and scrubbing part of the bathroom. To the rather loud tones of the Scissor Sisters.

(You'd reflected on that particular detail with mortification, but it was done now. So.)

But you feel like maybe your concerted efforts at normality do not quite live up to Danny's expectations thereof. She's been trying to get you to commit to some kind of daily check in. Not that she phrases it like that - it's more like she invites you to study over lunch or dinner on an ever increasing basis.

Which isn't bad, of course. It's just that... well, you've moved from the spontaneity of pie dates and arguing about Beowulf to status update texts and a periodic review of your vegetable intake and papers due.

But really those are all good things, you know that. So you usually agree when she invites you to study groups and literature discussions and pie dates. Only occasionally - maybe one time in three - do you let yourself find an excuse. An essay, your philosophy reading, hanging out with LaF. A phone call from your Dad.

But it's possible that two times in three isn't cutting it. Not in Danny's opinion, if the way she pushes her hair out of her eyes and frowns is any indication.

"I'm sorry, it's just I have this philosophy paper due Thursday and I haven't started it because we've been focussing on the journalism stuff - " you say. It's true enough that you've been working on your journalism and english papers with Danny; that's her area of expertise after all. You _have_ started your philosophy paper, you just haven't gotten very far with it because something always distracts you.

Danny brushes off the excuse. "Yeah, no, I get it. Wednesday is kind of a weird night to hold an event, I guess, it's just they only hold it once a year and I was hoping you could come."

She'd invited you to the Summer Society's Blue Moon ceremony, and you'd made an excuse before you realised it was a fairly big deal for her. Now you feel guilty, for not wanting to go and for acting like your study sessions are why you're behind with philosophy, but you also can't really change your mind now unless you admit you were lying a minute ago.  

"I really am sorry, Danny." You apologise, and she deflates a little. It's guilt that has you tack on - "Maybe you could catch me up on Thursday night, after I submit my paper?"

She perks up a bit at that, and you give yourself a mental pat on the back.. "Yeah. Okay, Hollis." She digs up the smile you've only seen directed at you, and wow, now you really feel bad about lying. "Dinner date Thursday? Someplace _off_ of campus?"

"Absolutely," you promise, and you make yourself smile.

 

* * *

 

Between one thing and another, you've been having trouble sleeping. You've said it before, but college is not what they make it look like in the media - there are far more classes to attend, reading summaries to write, names to remember, than any show could reasonably have their fanbase keep track of. Even Rory Gilmore would struggle with your class load, and that's before you get into the fact that you're insistent on having more a social life at college than your father ever would have coped with when you lived at home. You're still not exactly having wild times - well, not unless you hang out with LaF in the bio labs late at night again - but you're not about to become a hermit who only studies and spend time with her girlfriend.

Between the classes and group assignments and attempting to keep yourself fed, you should be falling face first into your pillow and dead asleep at night. And yet each time you fold your laundry or turn off your laptop or finish your washing up and crawl beneath your covers, you find yourself staring at your ceiling, awake.

You're actually on a better sleeping schedule now, largely thanks to Danny's fondness for brunch study sessions. But it doesn't much matter if you're getting into bed by midnight if you're still staring at six crappy glow in the dark stars at three in the morning.

Carmilla's usually still awake. It's typically pretty obvious that she is, too, between the rattling of her keyboard and the way she tends to murmur to herself. You try not to listen to her too closely now, you know you've invested too much of your energy into her already, and you have doubts about the wisdom of it even when you ignore the ethics.

But you'd have to be deaf not to realise that nights are her most active time. The time when she seems most awake, when she comes closest to being - if you can tell through a wall - happy.

Is it insane, that you think you can tell your flatmate's mood by the sound of her tapping her fingers and her keyboard through a wall? The pace of her footsteps on a carpet? The brush of her clothes against her bedding?

You tell yourself it's in your head, that you can't tell that she's cheerful from the way she closes a door. You tell yourself it's not any of your damn business, if she's happy. You don't know her and she'd probably be wholeheartedly squicked out if she knew how much time you spend thinking about what she's doing and who she is and what she's thinking.

You still can't sleep.

 

* * *

 

But your week passes quickly. Monday is your day most full of classes, and Tuesday afternoon you have a stats exam, so you spend the morning having a panic study session with LaF, who finds the whole subject aggravatingly easy. You have trouble telling a T test from a p value, so you have an alarming tendency to answer questions the exam does not in fact ask. LaF steers you straight with some very specific rules about when to use or not use formulae, although they re-confuse you when they wax lyrical about the philosophical difference between statistical significance and regular significance. Apparently, one does not always signify the other. You nod frantically and take more shorthand notes.

You still make a mess of the exam, but you're pretty sure it's less than you would have without LaF’s help. You take them out for a beer afterwards, although you opt for several cans of Red Bull. If you’re going to get going on your philosophy paper tomorrow, you’ll need to have at least completed the readings ahead of time. You probably won’t sleep tonight anyway, you rationalise. The caffeine will just make you more productive.

They drop you off at your door on their way to Perry’s room (and one day you’ll work up the nerve to ask if they’re dating or just weird), and you stand at your door and look at Carmilla’s for a while before you get around to letting yourself in. It’s closed, always has been except for that one time you maybe saw it move. Lately you’ve been doubting your memory of that; you know now that Carmilla is real, but you’ve watched for months now and you’ve never seen her leave.

You sigh, and let yourself into your room.

Despite your best efforts, though, you can’t seem to focus on your philosophy paper. This time it’s on the nature of identity, and what forms a consistent identity over time. You’re interested, and you have a thesis around the continuity of memory as a defining characteristic, but your readings aren't holding your attention tonight. They consider the existence of false memories, and the impact of second hand information on the construction of identity - something that interests you on a journalistic as much as a philosophical level - but you can’t settle into them to save yourself.

It’s possible you overdid it on the caffeine. It’s also possible that you heard Carmilla make herself a drink of something and settle onto her bed a half hour ago. You can hear the rustle as she turns the pages of her book, and her proximity is driving you a little crazy.

You make another cup of hot cocoa, clean up the mess your Tardis mug inevitably drips onto your sheets, and steadfastly refuse to open the one photograph of her you’ve let yourself save onto your laptop. You reopen your online reader instead and flick back a couple of pages, trying to find something you remember reading just minutes ago.

Locke, you’ve got a grip on from your tutorials. He argues memory consists of two components - an experience in the past, and the ability to recall it, or have a belief about it now. You’d planned to make an argument around the existence of false memories as a problem with his overall model, and therefore conflicting with a person’s concept of self. But you’ve since decided that a false memory doesn’t fulfil the first criteria of his model, so your critique feels somewhat hollow unless you can explain another model of identity which would fill that gap.

You flick more pages, hoping for inspiration.

> _Heidegger argued we were ‘beings-in-the-world’, not just in our own heads._ [1]

That sounds familiar. You read on.

>   _This suggests that the question ‘Who are you?’ cannot be answered by delving within ourselves, but by looking outwards to understand how we relate to others._

That… actually works quite well for your thesis. It helps to establish an additional criterion for what establishes your identity, beyond consistent recall of the past. And it links well - your memories are made up of your interactions with others, but each interaction is independent of any particular memory. So, potentially, you could lose memories sequentially and maintain a consistent relationship with an individual if you kept interacting with them, and acting the same way, throughout your relationship. Your identity would remain consistent.

You keep reading, but now your mind is racing with the implications of what you’ve just read, and you can’t focus on the new information. You pause, and read the previous selection again.

>   _Heidegger argued we were ‘beings-in-the-world’, not just in our own heads. This suggests that the question ‘Who are you?’ cannot be answered by delving within ourselves, but by looking outwards to understand how we relate to others._

You don’t realise until the end of the paragraph you’ve read it aloud, mostly muttered to yourself, but emphasising the last section.

On the other side of the wall, the sound of pages turning has stopped. That isn’t the only reason you continue - something about reading aloud is helping you concentrate - but it helps. You go on, trying to get the intricacies of the impacts of language and culture on shared perceptions, and then you find the perfect quote to use as an explanation on why identity is more than your experience of yourself:

>   _You are a husband or wife, mother or father, son, friend, colleague, lover, writer, cook, teacher, or plumber. And your identity is secured through mutual recognition or, as MacIntyre describes it: the story we tell about ourselves in our own heads has to line up with the stories that other people tell of us._

You pause, and copy paste it in and a reference into your Word doc. You feel more awkward continuing to read now that you’ve stopped, but Carmilla’s rustling noises haven’t resumed, so you girl up and keep reading aloud.

You stop and take notes as need be, but you don’t hear the sound of pages turning again.

 

* * *

 

You crash out for most of the next day. It’s hardly surprising, you ended up staying up til around five with your readings and your note taking. Your essay is still scarcely existent in terms of actual content, but you’ve worked out a skeleton of your argument and you have a lot of quotes to use, so it should happen.

It’s the last thing on your mind when you drop face first into your yellow pillow around six. Thank Christ for LaF and working out your attendance statistics, or you’d be getting up in two hours to make it to comparative literature. You attended almost all the early classes, though, so you’re in the clear to sleep til midday.

For once, you sleep deeply and without interruption. You don’t get direct light in the mornings and your room is the perfect temperature, and your bed has magically transformed into a magical cushion of bliss. Normally it’s an outdated and thin college mattress, so you ignore your phone buzzing on the floor to bury yourself in the most spectacularly comfortable blanket you’ve found in your entire life, and the perfection that is your yellow pillow.

Suffice to say, it’s a bit after midday when you emerge from the cocoon of your bed. It’s more like three pm, and you stumble to the kitchenette to drink deeply from the tap before your eyes are fully open.

When you feel halfway hydrated, you wash your face and then peer around and then down at yourself. Yeah, your room is exactly as much of a disaster as you’d thought and - yep - you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes and a dinosaur hoody. Ugh.

You pick up a cookie from the open container on top of the microwave on your way to the bathroom, shedding clothes as you go.

 

* * *

  
It’s probably the slow start, but your day remains pretty sedate. Once you’re wearing actually clean clothes (an ever diminishing resource), you need to address the explosion of books and clothing that is your room. Oh, and your sole food resources are now peanut butter and grape soda. Probably you need to do something about that.

Around five, you find your phone under your discarded hoody on the floor. Predictably, the battery has gone dead, so you stick it on your bedside table to charge while you take out your garbage and your laundry. You miss it while you’re loading up two of the washing machines - you like to listen to Rachel Maddow ripping strips off politicians while you sort - but then there’s an incident with the coin slot returning you what appear to be buttons instead of your coins, and you get distracted.

Once that’s sorted out, you take yourself to one of the campus stores for food and food-like substances. Your cash flow isn’t what it could be, especially after you traded five dollars for some exceptionally pretty buttons in the laundry room, but you stock up on cereal and soy milk and a different variety of cookies. Danny’s voice in the back of your head has you pick up a bag of apples, and then on the way back to the laundry you pick up some chinese food which is more than half green. You congratulate yourself on your choices on the way back to your room, and you’re pleased enough to be only mildly irked when one washer insists on the payment of a sock and some of your hair to complete the drying cycle.

You crack open a celebratory soda when you get back, and that and your pleasure at successful adulting get you through a majority of your vegetables. You have to stick your laptop back on its charger while you’re eating (the battery apparently died at the end of last night’s session), but once it’s ready to go you pull up your essay and start reading through your notes. They could definitely be more coherent, but you absolutely have the beginnings of a solid argument.

You pick at your leftovers as you parse your essay, tossing up over the implications of dementia and memory loss, and wrinkle your nose. Your greens are removed to the relative safety of the back of your desk, and replaced with trusty cookies by your side. If you’re going to write three thousand words by morning, you’re going to need all the help you can get.

The words come more easily than last time. Probably it’s a reflection on how much reading you prepared ahead of time; your essay on determinism suffered from your annoyance at the librarian as much as the lack of actual content. But then, too, you’re finding it easier to consider circumstances when a person’s identity might be constructed by more than their own individual memories, and more by the circumstances they find themselves in. Your identity has always been defined at least in part by the people around you: your father’s protectiveness, your English teacher’s belief in your abilities, the boys you weren’t attracted to and then the women that you were. Even your mother’s absence has helped to define you in a way that goes beyond the individual memories of her and how she treated you.

You frown, thinking on that. You barely remember your mother, but that doesn’t mean her influence hasn’t shaped your identity. Her death changed how you related to your father, because it changed his perception of risk and your safety. That’s impacted how you act even now, away from his ever present influence for the first time, so that your lack of memory of her isn’t relevant to her ability to influence your life and identity now.

You eat a broken cookie crumb, contemplating that. You feel so strongly about that, your mother’s capacity to influence your identity, that it seems a shame to not incorporate it into your paper. But you’re also not sure how much of that you want to share with your professor.

The beep of your computer makes you jump from where you’re lost in thought. While you’ve been distracted, it’s apparently downloaded an update and is asking your permission to install.

You roll your eyes and click yes, then curse when the computer immediately starts closing your programs to restart and install. Thank god for autosave.

It’s just gone to black screen and is rebooting when there’s a knock on your door. You frown, looking at your watch; it’s after nine and you’re not expecting anyone, although it could be LaF trying to rope you into another Biology Lab adventure. Two words: never again.

When you swing the door open, though, it’s Danny. You start to smile at her, and then you realise she’s wearing warpaint and she’s scowling at you.

She barges past you into the room without a word, and you turn to follow her, letting the door swing shut. She stands in the middle of the room, her back to you.

“Um. Hi?” You offer after a moment.

“What the hell, Laura.”

It's not a question.

“Danny?” you say.

She looks around your room, at the laundry on your bed, the books on your floor, the cookies in front of your computer, your phone on its charger. You wince a little, it’s better than this morning but it could still definitely be better.

“Where have you been?” she asks.

You return the frown that hasn’t left her face. “Here. Writing my philosophy essay, exactly - ”

“You weren’t in class this morning,” she interrupts. “You haven’t answered your phone all day.”

“Yeah, I had a late night, I - wait, you texted?” you ask. You go to your bedside table, pick up your phone. You turn it on, and as soon as the loading screen disappears, the phone pings repeatedly with notifications. You wince, no worry she worried. “Crap, sorry, it ran out of battery and I just didn’t turn it back on…” you trail off, because she’s staring at you, and it’s not a good stare.

You try again. “Hey. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your texts, it wasn’t deliberate. I’m just so wrapped up in this essay I didn’t realise my phone was dead.”

That frown has only gotten worse, and she looks at you with disbelief. “Laura, for god’s sake, your computer isn’t even on.”

“It’s rebooting!” you protest, and she drops her face into her hands, pinches the bridge of her nose with two fingers.

“For the love of - I got worried.” she interrupts herself. “You missed class, and you didn’t answer my texts, and you didn’t want to come tonight, so I ditched Blue Moon Festival. Where they chose me for the Artemis Hunt, just by the way, so I could come check you were okay.” She shakes her head slowly. “And your phone is off and you’re not even working.”

You don’t know what the Artemis Hunt is, but from the way she pronounces it, it’s a big a deal. Your stomach bottoms out, this is going nowhere good. “Danny,” you say softly, but she doesn’t hear you.

“I am so tired of this, you know? I’m tired of trying to take care of you when all you want to do is stay home and obsess over some poor little teenager.”

Sound roars in your ears. Your mouth drops open, and you struggle to regroup.“What the hell, Danny, I told you I was working on my essay!”

“Oh bullshit Laura, you blow me off twice a week so you can lie on your bed and fantasize while you listen to some damaged creeper wander around her room,” she spits, and oh shit, you thought she’d forgotten about your interest in Carmilla.

“She is not -” you break off. “She’s hardly some poor little rich girl.” you protest, and something ugly crosses Danny’s face.

“Oh, but you are obsessed with her? You do lie there and listen to her?”

You do. You know you do. But that is not the point.

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” You warn.

Danny looks skyward, tossing her hair back. “For God’s sake, Laura, you’ve been bloody obsessed with her for months. It’s so obvious.”

“I have not, I don’t even talk about her,” you protest. You think frantically back, trying to think of the last time you talked to Danny - the last time you talked to anyone - about Carmilla. And you haven’t, you’re sure you haven’t. You hope you haven’t.

Danny snorts. “You don’t talk but you spend half your time listening to her move around and fantasizing what she's up to.”

That’s the second time she’s used that word and you hate it. You hate the implication that that’s how you’ve treated Carmilla. You’ve never done that.

“I do not _fantasize_ about her,” you say, soft and deadly. But Danny’s on a roll, and she doesn’t care.

“It’s like some sick fucking fetish for you. You told the whole damn Lit class on the first day you wanted to be a better class of journalist, and you spend all your time sniffing around a disaster victim. You fucking hypocrite.”

“This is not for a story!” and now you’re shouting because she’s hit a nerve. “I am not sniffing around her like some creep, I _worry_ about her. You of all people should understand that.”

Danny jerks back, and then her lip curls. “You don’t even know her and you are completely obsessed.”

“And you’re jealous of a girl I’ve never even met.” You shoot back.

She turns her face away at that, takes a step back. When she turns back, she’s calmer, trying to reason with you.

“Laura. Are you listening to yourself? Seriously listening? Because this is crazy. Totally crazy, and I care about you and I don’t want you getting wrapped up in something that doesn't have anything to do with you.” she says.

You nod, slowly. “I don’t need you to protect me,” you tell her.

“But that’s my job!” she says immediately, and you feel your eyebrows rise.

“Your job?” you question. Your voice is full of disbelief.

She hesitates, knowing she’s stepped wrong, but she forges on regardless. “I care about you and it is my responsibility to make sure you’re okay.”

You grab the edge of your desk, holding yourself upright. You’re reeling.

“The last thing I need from you is to be protected,” you say, and it’s as calm as you can manage, but you’re angry and it shows. “God, Danny. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I don’t need you to protect me? That I don’t need you to check if I eat or sleep or get to class? I managed eighteen years without you, Danny Lawrence, and I'm doing just fine.”

She rears back, distressed now more than angry. “I just want what's best for you.”

“Well, maybe you should let me decide what that is.” You don’t want to sound bitter, but you do.

Danny looks down, glances around your room again and then down at her hands. “Maybe I should go,” she says after a minute.

You inhale, exhale. You don’t have anything else to say.

“Yeah, you should.”

 

* * *

  
You sit on your bed and hold your knees.

You’re pretty sure you just broke up with Danny. She wasn’t even officially your girlfriend.

Shit, that is not going to do anything good for your lit grade. Like not that that’s a major consideration right now, but… well, crap.

And it’s because of how you feel about Carmilla. Well, sort of, it’s not like you have any kind of relationship with the girl, it’s just that you… well, yes, you’re interested but not like how Danny had said it. You’re not obsessed, you’re not sniffing around her like that’s going to get you some kind of big break story. Maybe that crossed your mind for a minute or two, once or twice, but that was months ago.

Now you just… well, like you told Danny, you worry. You’re not obsessed, you certainly don’t fantasize about her. Not unless like, wondering what she wears and how she eats counts as fantasizing, that’s more like filling in blanks of a story that you have two, admittedly significant, pieces of.

You crush your face into your knees, hugging them against you. Your essay is still due tomorrow. You don’t have time for this.

 

* * *

 

Writing doesn’t go as smoothly now. You don’t end up putting the section in about your mother; right now she feels a lot less relevant to your identity and to your thesis. Maybe that’s ironic, because she underpins every reason that you can’t bear for Danny to try and take care of you, but you can’t make that idea cohere any more.

Instead, Carmilla echoes in every word you put on the page. She’s less active this evening, and you hope with everything you have in you that she didn’t hear your fight, because she aches through every word you write down about perceived and constructed identity.

Because who else would you be talking about but the girl whose identity the world constructed?  The girl who lost her sense of self when her family died, the girl the media believed they knew the story of. The girl whose life was reconstructed for the world in purple prose and long angle lenses. The girl you saw manipulated and used to sell story after fucking story. The girl you fixated on as soon as you knew her identity, the girl you listened to, watched for, constructed theories about, the girl you convinced yourself you knew.

You stop typing, and hold your hands over your face. Because Danny isn’t right about everything, not by a long shot, but she is right about this one. Because you’re just another person who tried to define Carmilla Karnstein and make her fit the constructed identity of your choosing.

You try not to cry.

Because this is a girl whose self perception was so skewed by the loss of her family and the attention of the world, that she’s ceased to go outside when anyone can see her.

And you’ve been just another one of them.

 

* * *

 

Between the crying and rewriting of overly emotional sections, it’s almost five by the time you finish your essay.

You print it before you can think it any further through, and trudge out to slot it through the assignments box of the philosophy department. The flame over it changes colour to confirm it’s accepted your paper, and you leave immediately. You want nothing more than to be home and in bed right now.

It’s still dark outside, and noticeably colder than twelve hours earlier. The sky is as grey and miserable as you feel, and there’s never been a day you feel more justified in going home and sleeping through. Silas has never seemed so dank and cold.

You want hot cocoa, and your yellow pillow and patchwork quilt, and your dad to give you a hug, and for everything to be easy and for you to stop feeling like you’ve usurped someone’s life for a creepy fantasy.

Well, at least you know you have milk. Trying to live up to Danny’s expectations scored you that much. And on the plus side of failing them, you may never have to eat another green vegetable again.

 

* * *

  
Time passes slowly. You give yourself the day off to sleep, catch up on last night, but you don't. You lie on your bed and watch the shadows of the tree outside cross the floor.

You used to think of how they must cross Carmilla’s room too. How she might lie on her bed and look up at the sky through the leaves the way you like to. But you don't let yourself think about that any more.

You hear her wake up late, her bare feet wandering. How she opens her blinds, pick up a book, murmurs to herself when she reads on her feet. Then the boiling of her kettle, the clink of a teaspoon in her mug, the creak of the springs when she sits on the bed.

You pretend you can't recognise any of it. It feels like the only decent thing you know how to do.

That night you must sleep, because you wake up at ten and are surprised when you realise your music is still playing. Apparently, your endless Pandora station really is endless. Go figure, at least something in your life sticks to its claims.

You mean to get up and shower, at least get rid of the leftover takeout still sitting at the back of your desk. You're going to put away the clean laundry you had simply pushed onto the floor to get into your bed, and change into some of it. You're going to go to your stats lecture, and at least try to keep up now that Laf has given you a crash course in understanding.

You don't so much as picking up your buzzing phone.

Across the room, your cashew stir fry starts to smell stale and sweet.

 

* * *

  
Saturday is kind of hazy. Your phone buzzes again, you flip your pillow over to a less drool infused side, your music keeps playing from your laptop. You think maybe there's hip hop for a while, which doesn't make much sense, but maybe it’s just that it’s been a while since you gave Pandora any feedback on its selection.

Sunday you remember better because Carmilla seems upset about something, or at least you hear her swear and then kick at something. If she were anyone else you'd think she was grouchy, stomping about and settling into her (probably) desk chair with another of her endless books. But you don't think about her any more.

You aren't the person you thought you were, but you can try to be better. It's just hard when she spends her evening sitting on the other side of the wall, turning endless pages in her book and occasionally tapping her fingers with your music.

If you turned it off, you’d have one less reason to be aware of her. But it’s on the other side of your room, and you can’t bear to pull back your covers and cross the floorboards.

You bury your face in your sheets, and think about blue whales, mountains, Irish dancing. And then, when it doesn’t work, the election, Hillary Clinton, climate change, Nicola Tesla. Anything that isn’t the proximity of Carmilla Karnstein.

 

* * *

  
On Tuesday, your father calls.

You’d made it out of bed and into your desk chair. It wasn’t so much a triumph over your self loathing as the way the smell of your sheets had become like a solid presence around you. You’d gotten used to the smell of your sweat and the way you seem to be able to feel each of the bones in all of your joints, but the accumulation of oil in your hair seems to have transferred itself to your sheets, and the build up of that sweetish smell on your beloved yellow pillow has become peculiarly unbearable.

So you’d begrudgingly pulled back your begrimed sheets, and made it to your chair. And once you’d done it, you couldn’t stand the thought of getting back into them. You’ll have to wash them to be able to get back into that bed, but that will mean getting dressed, and dressing would mean showering, and showering would mean having to leave the safe room that your bedroom has become.

You’re working up the nerve to face the first stage of that overlong process when your phone rings. It’s buzzed all week, but you’ve assigned your father the Doctor Who ringtone, and when it goes off, you go still.

You cannot talk to your father when you are like this. When you haven’t gone to class in days, when you’re covered in grime, when you’ve dumped or been dumped by your TA, when you’ve become a person you don’t recognise.

Your phone rings out twice, and you hold every muscle still throughout. It’s like a fairytale; if you don’t move at all, no one can see or touch you.

When it stops, you close your eyes and just listen to yourself breathe. Your inhales are short, sharp, your exhales almost an afterthought. Your heart thumps too hard in your chest.

When it all slows, you stagger back across the room to your phone and look at the screen. You haven’t touched it in days, the battery would be long flat if you hadn’t left it on the charger the night Danny visited.

You have message on message waiting. LaF, Sophia from your group project, one or two from Perry the floor don, even one from Danny. You look at the date and realise it’s Tuesday; you’ve missed three lit classes, so probably Danny contacting you was predictable.

There are emails, snapchat notifications, tweets. But the only missed calls are from your father.

You stare at the call register, at his so familiar phone number. He raised you to be polite, and considerate of others. To protect yourself, but to do no harm where you could avoid it. To respect people, and boundaries, and to possess integrity and kindness. You can’t talk to him like this, and so you take the phone off the charger, and you walk away and leave it there.

At least it’s prompt enough to get you out of your room and into the shower.

 

* * *

 

Showering seems to set some kind of reset button on your life, even if you’re not quite ready to go outside and be around other people yet. But you manage to get yourself cleaned and clothed, and to address at least the surface layer of filth that has accumulated while you were too distressed to get up.

The sheets are the first thing to go, piled into a ball and stashed to go out. The remnants of food around your room go into a garbage bag, and that joins your sheets by the door. Once it’s a little later, you can take them both out.  And you’ve washed your hair, so you braid it back once it’s dry enough. You’re unwilling to have the cloud of it stick to you right now. Not when the smell of its greasy length still seems to cling to your bedroom, attached to your balled up sheets. You wrinkle your nose, and open the window.

Once you’ve shaken out and put away the nominally clean laundry on the floor, you’re even kind of hungry. So you make yourself some cocoa once you’ve sniffed the milk, and you have that and some cookies for dinner. Begrudgingly, you even eat one of the apples; after all, you paid for them.

When it’s late enough, you take your garbage and sheets down the hall, ducking hurriedly past the common room and anywhere else you might run into someone you know. You’re up, you’re just… not up for company right now. So you drop your sheets in the machine and go back to your room, and you start to tackle the backlog of email and assignment that have accumulated. You don’t think Silas will be overly accepting of self loathing as a reason for incomplete work.

And while you’re at it, you spend an hour or so going back through the last twenty four hours of music that Pandora has played, and tell it exactly what you think of its choices.

 

* * *

 

Working keeps you busy, and you appreciate that. You’ve slept enough for a week or more, and now there are things you should be doing. Things like catching up on five days worth of classes, your readings and lectures, your class papers. They keep you occupied for a while.

And when you stop being able to concentrate on those for more than a minute at a time, there’s always twenty six seasons of Doctor Who and seven of Buffy that you brought to university.

You just need something else to hold your attention right now. You’ve managed to get up and to get some grip back on your regular life, but you also need some means of ensuring you don’t go straight back into grieving over Danny or obsessing over Carmilla. You need to be less absorbed by the women in your life.

And ugh, you’re doing it again. Because Carmilla is not a woman in your life. She isn’t your friend, she isn’t even someone you’ve met. She’s someone you share a wall with, with whom you had so little interaction you believed she wasn’t there. The two of you have never exchanged words, glances, acknowledgement. You’ve built a story around her, but she doesn’t know who you are and the closest you’ve ever come to interacting is the way she went silent when you read aloud. For god’s sakes, she probably just got tired of listening to you and put her headphones on.

You need to not think about her any more. You’re determined to let this go.

Naturally, she's around all week.

Well, of course she is, she literally never leaves. But it was a lot easier to deal with when you were asleep or only halfway conscious. Now that you’re back onto your usual irregular sleep patterns, she is a lot harder to ignore.

Usually - and you scolded yourself for even knowing this - she spends her day migrating throughout her apartment. You hear her desk chair on the far side of the room move about, or food prep in the kitchenette. She takes very long showers, the water running until you're surprised your room doesn't steam up too. And later in the day, she's more inclined to settle on her bed or the floor with a book or other reading. The rustle of pages is something you'd found intimately familiar.

Now, as you go day on day in your room without sleep, you can't help that notice she's behaving differently. You no longer want to know, but you can't avoid recognising that her routines have changed.

She still types in staccato bursts, like the words might get away from her. But you don't hear the creak of her old wooden desk, and you're sure the tapping is louder now than it’s ever been. Your father would be horrified at the risk to her spine, but you think she has begun working on her bed.

And she moves sooner into the reading part of her day now. The turning of pages seems slower, so maybe she just needs more time to get her readings done.

She even seems to spend less time in the shower, although that in particular is something you have been avoiding thinking about. It's just that all in all, she has seemed to be spending a lot more of her time in closer proximity to you.

It's ridiculous even to think it, but it feels almost as though your every effort to push her away is being met by an attempt by her to come closer. Like you are attached by the far ends of a rubber band, which stretches only so far before it tugs you back together.

But that's stupid, and makes it sound like there's something deliberate in her response to you. And you don't know her, and you are certainly no one special. Eventually, you will learn to let this go.

 

* * *

 

You're not much good at crying. It makes you uncomfortable and you hate it when anyone sees, you don't know how to respond when people try to be nice. Honestly you'd rather that the whole thing just wouldn't happen. But around Friday, you do, and it's a kind of turning point. 

You're tired, and it's been a couple of days since you slept, and your efforts to not pay attention to Carmilla aren't really working and you feel rubbish about yourself again. Add in that you got your stats grade back via email and yeah, okay, you're allowed to cry.

You've remade your bed, even if you haven't slept in it. And now you sit on the edge and grab your yellow pillow and sob into it.

Maybe the reason you hate crying is that you ugly cry. You don't do the silent tears down cheeks that you see in the movies; you sob with your mouth open like a child and let out loud, choking noises when you gasp to breathe. Your nose runs and you swallow too much salt and you always manage to give yourself an awful headache. Anyone with sense would leave you be and sort you out when you've regained coherence and the illusion of adulthood.

But Carmilla still seems to be on the other end of your rubber band. Because when you sit down on your bed, beginning to cry, she doesn't move away. In fact for long minutes she doesn't seem to move at all.

When you hear the creak of her floorboards, you're glad.  Between sobbing and struggling to breathe, you're making a hell of a noise. It's probably all to the best if she disappears into the bathroom for one of her endless showers, and you don’t need to pretend to ignore her presence.

But the next creak isn't the floorboards; it's the springs of her bed. And then you hear the tap of something on the other side of the wall. You draw the mental map of her apartment that has become second nature, even as you deny it, and you have one conclusion.

Carmilla is beside you. On her side of the wall, on her bed, but beside you. As close as she can reasonably be, hovering as near as a good friend with a box of tissues and a concerned face. And there’s no laptop, no book pages, only her.

You've doubted all week. No, you'd outright denied it. Danny had called you obsessive and thought you perverse, and you couldn't argue with her logic when you'd already questioned yourself, and you'd believed her. You thought you were an obsessive creeper baby journalist who'd fixated on her famous roommate as just another story. You thought you'd invented all of your stories about her, constructed a fantasy based on the barest of noises you could hear and the outline of a story published years ago.

But Carmilla is here, and she is next to you, and she is acknowledging your tears. You’re sure of it.

She is here and she is real, and she is responding to you.

You cry harder, but this time there's relief in it.

 

* * *

  
Later, you feel stupid.

Because yeah, you overstepped, and you assumed, and you made up a bunch of stories about Carmilla that you have no way of confirming or denying. And yeah, that takes away some of her autonomy and that’s not okay, but you’d convinced yourself with Danny’s accusations that you’d never known anything about Carmilla at all. That you were fixating on her, and you were strangers.

And yeah, you’ve never spoken. But you’ve listened to her for months, and unless you’re very, very wrong, she’s been listening to you too.

This week, she’s responded to you going quiet and sleepless, and she’d stayed when you cried until you went silent and soft. But long before that, she’s reacted to you. She’s acknowledged your music, she’s gone silent when you read aloud, she heard when you laughed at her. She’s been louder when she thinks you’re not around; when you’ve been settling down, she has followed you to bed. She's done that tonight. And oh yeah, there was the time you thought she said your name.

You twist in your sheets, blushing to think of it. What she’d done, and how you’d heard her, and how you’d pushed it so far out of your thoughts you had forgotten to use it to counter everything Danny had said to you.

Because of course Danny didn’t know about that. Of course you never told anyone else about the time that happened. And you’d always doubted, somehow, that it had been your name she had said, and that it had been you that she meant. You can’t quite believe that the neighbor you’ve spent a week convincing yourself doesn’t know you exist had done that for you.

But last night you cried, and she came as close as she could without puncturing the wall between you. You can’t convince yourself that wasn’t real, and that means that all the rest of it probably was real, too.

And so finally, you know that it isn’t just you. That this connection isn’t just in your head. That you aren’t some lecherous journalist creeper that’s pursuing her for a story, you’re just her neighbor who happens to have, well, feelings for her. That she possibly, maybe, reciprocates.

You’re not awful, you’re just a girl with a crush.

And you know now, that she’s there, and that she’s listening. You think that she always has been, and there’s still one thing more that you know about her that you haven’t returned.

You’ve spent the week feeling terrible and off balance. But it feels honest, now, when you slip out of your pyjamas, tossing them onto the floor. It feels real, when you slip back onto the bed and turn your face into your pillow.

And when you slip your fingers between your legs and let yourself think about Carmilla? For the first time, she seems tangible.

And that feels pretty amazing.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The block quotes in this section are from this reference: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/where-does-identity-go-once-memory-falters-in-dementia/ and were tweaked a little bit for the purposes of this story. It's a good read if you're interested in the philosophy of identity, although the reference is specifically about dementia and identity.
> 
>  
> 
> You can also find me at [geoclaire on tumblr](https://www.geoclaire.tumblr.com)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where they're finally talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Detect my sudden existence on your sonar_  
>  You feel the echo  
> Electrify the resistance in your broken heart  
> And burn it up, oh  
> We’re gonna photosynthesize and drink up the sunrise
> 
>  
> 
> _So do they ever shut up because you said so or_  
>  Do you overthink ’em all  
> Somebody ought to corrupt you on the dance floor  
> And take you home  
> Show you all your daemons and desires and dark sides  
> All of your colonies and continental divides
> 
>  
> 
> _Let me uncover the silver in your dark hair_  
>  The weight of your bones  
> I want to witness the beauty of your repair  
> The shape you’ve grown  
> For you are made of nebulas and novas and night sky  
> You’re made of memories you bury or live by

You wake up with your face smushed into your yellow pillow. Normally this would be delightful, but right now the material is unpleasantly wet from a drool situation best summarised as epic.  
  
That’s hardly unusual, but when you roll over to breathe actual oxygen, you find that you’re lying the wrong way on your bed and a quick glance downwards confirms that - yep - you’re naked. You sit up in a hurry.   
  
Holy shit, last night actually happened.  
  
And maybe it’s kinda weird that part of you is doubting it, and yet it’s not. Because while you can never tell anyone, it’s a tiny little bit possible that you’ve dreamed of talking with Carmilla, once or twice. Usually those dreams take place outside, where you’re chatting casually and maybe eating ice cream or something, and it’s easy to work out that those weren’t things that were going to happen, but there’s been some based around being in your room. Enough to make you doubt, anyway.  
  
But you woke up facing the wrong way on your bed, butt naked and your hand still pressed to the wall. So either you have truly alarming sleepwalking habits, or last night you and Carmilla talked.   
  
Okay, you more than talked, and thinking about how you managed to initiate actual interaction with her is making you blush right down your chest, but seriously. You hug yourself a little, because you were right, and this is real, and Carmilla spoke to you.  
  
You cock your head to listen for a moment. You can’t hear Carmilla moving around, and when you wait a moment longer, you can pick up the rhythmic pattern that is her sleeping breathing. There’s a little catch on the end of her exhale, followed by a pause, that is distinct from her waking breath.   
  
You don’t want to wake her, at least not yet. So you slide carefully to the far edge of your bed and lower your feet to the floor, making your movements soft as you get up and go into the bathroom. You’re just a little stiff and sore, and you flashback to why, to your hand between your thighs and Carmilla’s soft moan on the other side of the wall.  
  
You hadn’t talked a lot about what you’d both done, each alone but in tune on your own separate beds. Honestly, you’d barely acknowledged it all, you’d mentioned it in passing but you’d barely cared about that aspect in the thrill of knowing that Carmilla was responding to you. Because that part was more important to both of you; you talked about that part, because you’d both needed to confirm that yes, each of you had always known that the other was there.  
  
You shake your head at that thought, trying to clear it of the confusion of identifying a shared experience. Because the grammar is strange but the fact is that Carmilla had been shocked to realise that you had always known that she was there. And you can’t hold that against her, you can see that it’s the strangest of situations to build a relationship the way you have been. That was what Danny couldn’t get past, the voyeuristic angle of building a relationship with someone you could hear but never see or speak to. And Carmilla is good, very good, at hiding in plain sight, at fading out when she doesn’t want to be seen.  
  
But you had paid attention even when you didn’t mean to, and it seems that you’ve both managed to subtly signal your own attention without the intention to do so. You’d stumbled through explaining that to Carmilla, trying to tell her that you’d noticed her habits change in response to yours but not cross into creepy territory. Because you’d listened and you’d heard and you’d worked it out, but you’d never meant to. Surely intention should count for something.  
  
You shake your head at yourself again in the mirror, and turn to put the shower on. If you’re going to get hung up over your ethics and your relationship with Carmilla now, you can at least do it after a hot shower.   
  
You wash your hair while you're in there, dragging it back from your forehead and scrubbing your face with a washcloth to rid yourself of remnant drool. You're less thorough on the rest of your body, only skimming most of your skin before making a quick job of cleaning between your legs. Even that's enough to make you shudder briefly, and you blink away the immediate association with Carmilla. It's not the time.  
  
When you're done, you dry off and dress quickly. Your hair's too wet to leave loose, so you towel it as quickly as you can manage before returning it to the strict braid you've adopted lately. You've been peculiarly aware of your hair the last few days, and pulling it back so tightly makes it feel under control. You tie it off with a scrap of ribbon and go to grab your backpack, slotting your laptop into it on your way to your door.   
  
And then you pause with your hand on the door knob. Because what exactly is the protocol for leaving here? It's not like you can leave Carmilla a note, and you don't want to wake her just to tell her you're going out. She gets most of her sleep in daylight hours, and you don't have her phone number.

And then, some part of you objects to the sense that you're looking, not for her consent, but maybe her acceptance of your planned movements. You scowl a little, because you're not looking for someone else to give status updates to, and that makes up your mind as you swing the door open and hurry to your group project meeting in the Caf. 

 

* * *

 

  
It's after lunch time when you get back, and you know immediately that Carmilla's awake now. There's a faint noise like fabric on fabric emanating from her side of the wall, but it's not that that tells you. It’s more like a tense consciousness you can feel in the atmosphere.  
  
You let the door close softly, and put your bag down on your desk chair. The noise next door stops immediately, and you can feel her anxiety clear through the wall. You pause to think, and then you take two steps to the side and knock quickly on the wall by the end of your bed.   
  
"Carm?"  
  
There's a scuffling noise from her side, feet on the floor. And then, "Laura?"  
  
You're beaming. And you shouldn't be this excited, because her voice is low and cautious and you clearly made her worry by leaving the way you did. And yet.  
  
"Hey." You say, and there’s happiness in it.  
  
"… Hey."  
  
You think maybe she can hear your smile, because it's so present, and she sounds maybe a tiny bit less anxious now. That's good, but you have another fairly pressing concern.  
  
"Can you, um. Maybe put on some music for a moment?"  
  
She's slow to respond, and you don't blame her, because that was clearly out of left field. "What?" She asks.  
  
But your mind is racing now, and you honestly can't wait for her to work it out. "Never mind, I got it. Can you just… wait a sec? Please?"  
  
You're pulling your phone out of your pocket already, and it takes her a moment again to respond, so you've pulled up a playlist before she replies.

"I'm not exactly going anywhere, cupcake."

Your chest tightens at the softness of that response. But things are getting a little desperate, so you hit play on your phone and dive into your bathroom without saying anything more. You'd stress-drunk your bodyweight in hot cocoa this morning, and it was taking the opportunity to leave in a hurry.   
  
You stare at yourself in the mirror as you wash your hands, and you look stressed - little lines around your forehead haven't faded from last week - but there's a smile lurking around your mouth. You look down, and let yourself feel it for a second. Because things are complicated for sure but Carmilla is  _talking to you_.   
  
You dry your hands, and take the opportunity to pull out the end of your braid.  
  
Back in the bedroom, Taylor Swift is still playing, and you hit the pause button. "Just one more second," you say, and Carmilla's response is a low hum issued a moment late.

You wince a bit, but you take the chance and grab your latest packet of cookies and some grape soda before you sit down on the bed, facing her wall. You can feel the weight of her attention now, and you swallow before you speak.

"Sorry. I'm sorted now. I got stuck with my project group and didn't get lunch, so I'm just - doing that now." You pause, and this time she's quick to fill the gap.  
  
"That's where you were this morning?"  
  
You adjust your shoulders inside your shirt, uncomfortable. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the biggest deal to wake her up when you were leaving. A note under the door wouldn’t have been too big a boundary breach, probably.

"Yeah, dumbass statistics project. Something about proportionate lake snail shell sizes, and I'm terrible at stats and since when do lakes have snails like sea snails anyway?" You're anxious now too, and you find yourself rambling. You take a breath and make yourself stop. "Sorry. But yeah, skipping was a bad idea, and I just… I didn't want to wake you, and there wasn't another way…"

It takes her a while to respond to your trailing off. "I wasn't, I mean, I thought - uh, I just, I wasn't sure whether you'd…" she trails off, and you can feel her frustration with what she's trying to express.   
  
You think of how you'd woken up, confused and only convinced in last night's reality because you were stark naked and upside down. You reach out, touch the wall with cookie-crumbed fingertips.  
  
"No, that's - that's it, that was all. I had to go to a stupid project meeting, nothing else." You hesitate, and then the words fall out. “I could have stuck a note under your door? But I didn’t want to - I don’t know. It’s your room, I didn’t want to, like, intrude.”  
  
She breathes slow and controlled, like she’s listening intently, and it’s a little choked when she allows, “That was probably a good idea. Not intruding, I mean. I can get a little… stressed.”

“I figured,” you say, soft but intent, and she laughs a little.

“I’m sure you did.”

 

* * *

 

Talking through a wall is awkward on a number of levels. Bathroom breaks aside, not being able to see one another’s faces means that every sentence of every conversation has to be constructed with extreme caution, two arms of a bridge reaching to one another.

So there are things you don’t talk about. Things like family, and personal histories, and a range of anxieties. But after a while, Carmilla clears her throat in a way you’re already beginning to recognise and awkwardly asks how you’d known her name. And you gape in response, because it feels like so long ago that you’d worked it all out. So long ago, and she’d had no way of knowing that you knew.

"Uh, your groceries were out in the hall that one night. With your name on them." She's silent for a while, and you add hopefully, "That night I left you a packet of cookies?"

She’s silent, and then - “That was  _you_?”

“Uh, yeah.” you say hesitantly, surprised by her vehemence. And then you think about it, about the assumptions you’d made and the hours she keeps, and - “Wait, you didn’t know?”

"I thought… I don't know, that the grocery store had thrown them in with the order." There’s a creak of the bedsprings, and you picture her shifting uncomfortably, picking at the comforter with her fingernails. “Maybe I should have guessed, you eat cookies like it’s a mission statement.”

You look down at the packet in your lap, and feel yourself flush. “I do not,” you object, and your denying gesture makes the packet crackle.

She laughs, and your blush rises further. “You’re eating them right now, cupcake.” she says, and you have no way to argue.

“They’re delicious,” you defend halfheartedly, and she laughs again, but your conversation has made you think of something. “Wait, how did you even get your groceries delivered so late? I didn’t think Trader Joe’s even had a store in Styria.”

Her laugh cuts off. “They don’t.”

You don’t know how to respond to that, and you worry, because maybe now you’re miscommunicating again. “Oh. Um…”

But she rescues you when she asks, “You know who I am, right?”

You cock your head, and you’re confused, because isn’t that what you’re already talking about?

“Yeah, Carm,” and you use her name to serve the point.

But she sighs in response, and you can tell she’s not happy with that answer. “No, I mean - uh, my family and what, just -  really, who I am.”

She’s struggling and uncomfortable, and you know the feeling, because isn’t that how you felt all last week? Like you’re being misrepresented by someone you thought you could trust, like you’re misrepresenting even yourself.

“Carmilla Karnstein. Karnstein Industries,” you say, soft but clear, and then you remind her, “I’m from Silas, Carm. I know who you are.”

She sniffs, quick and pained, and you close your eyes.

“Well. Suffice to say I have an inheritance for when I’m twenty one. And until then I have a guardian and a heck of a stipend.”

“And TJ’s?” you ask, but you can guess where this is going.

“I pay them a ridiculous amount of money,” she says, and there’s just enough annoyance in her voice to make you laugh.

"Well, yeah. Probably that'd do it."

 

* * *

 

You talk for a while that first day, past sunset and well into the night. Not about the elephant in the room, but about books and your studies and how she'd snookered your determinism essay. She'd laughed when you told her how you'd seen her name on every library book record, and confessed she hadn't even had a class on it, she has just been interested. You’d volunteered some information about your studies, and launched into an awkward and non-requested dissection of the problems of modern journalism, and her responses were few but telling. You didn’t talk about her family, you’re not that stupid, but you like to think that you demonstrated that you’re not a voyeuristic creep.

But it takes a few more days of talking before you ask what’s either an obvious or a really dumb question, depending on how you look at it.

“Hey, Carm?”

It’s late afternoon and warm, and you’ve both been lounging on your beds, so it doesn’t surprise you when the response is a while coming. “Mmmm?”

You bite your lip, because maybe this crosses some kind of boundary, and yet you want to know. “What do you look like?”

You hear the bedsprings whine as Carmilla sits up, and you do the same. “I think you know that, sunshine,” she says after a moment.

And she’s right, of course she’s right, because you’ve seen her face splashed across a hundred tabloids, and yet. You bite your lip, because maybe this is pushing too far over a line you fear to cross, but it’d be dishonest to avoid it entirely now.

“Uh, kinda, I guess. I mean - “ you fumble, “I know what you used to look like? But I also, I mean,” and you swallow and try to explain cogently, “I saw those before, you know? And once I knew that you were you, I didn’t want to look at them.”

She’s silent for a long time, and you panic as quietly as you can manage. In your head, she’s aligning you with every jackass who ever shoved a lens in her face or took a wide angle shot of her demolished house and then speculated about her feelings over the pictures of the wreckage. You’ve spent a week mentally aligning yourself with those people, why wouldn’t she?

You pick at your nails, and try to remember that she’s not in the habit of talking to people. That her silence isn’t necessarily bad, it just means she’s taking the time to think her thoughts right through before she responds.

“That’s oddly sweet.” She says finally. She’s more hesitant when she goes on, but she asks, “What do you want to know?”

Everything, you want to say, but you don’t want to overwhelm her. You are being very careful not to push. Instead, you close your eyes, projecting her onto the back of your eyelids, and pick the details that are haziest.

“I want to know - how tall you are. And how you do your hair. And what you wear,” and you blush furiously when you hear yourself.

“Aren’t you forward,” she murmurs huskily, and you can feel your heartbeat everywhere. She laughs lowly, and then clears her throat.

“I’m five three. And my hair is, uh, about down to my elbows when it’s straightened. Which I don’t really bother with any more, so it’s wavy. And I wear skinny jeans and singlets, mostly. Dark ones.”

"... Huh. Okay."

It surprises you that she's taller than you, and it shouldn't, because literally everyone is taller than you. And yet you've been harboring vague fantasies of tucking her under your chin.

"You sound disappointed, sweetcheeks."

"I just didn't pick you for skinny jeans. Aren't they a bit too hipster now?" You lie.

"I'm hardly the person to ask." She pauses, but you can feel she isn't done. "I don't mind, you know."

She’s lost you. "You don’t mind what?"

"If you look up photos of me."

That catches your attention, and you sit up suddenly straighter. Because the world has been in her face and breathing down her neck and invading her life, but she doesn’t mind if you look at the pictures.

"Isn't that, I don't know, kinda weird?" You ask cautiously.

You all but hear her shrug. "’Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’"

"Nietzsche?" You guess, and she laughs.

"Shakespeare, cutie." And she hums, clearly amused. "Aren't you going to return the favour?"

You cast a confused glance to the wall. "You want me to quote Shakespeare?"

She snorts. " _No_. I want to see a photograph."

You’re frowning, because somehow it hasn’t occurred to you, and - “Wait, do you have any idea what I look like?”

She goes quiet, and a world of worry goes through your head. The pair of you - well - you both thought you were attracted to one another, but what if the you she’s imagined isn’t anything like that you that is actually you? You bite down on your lip hard, hoping for something you can’t describe.

“I saw you moving in,” she says eventually. It’s strange, because you’re already used to her voice, and already you can hear the difference that her anxiety makes. “I saw you move in, and then I’d see you in the corridor sometimes. Or leaving. Your panicked run is very distinctive,” she tries to tease, but it’s clear her heart’s not in it.

“Uh,  _rude_.” You’d give her a harder time, but you’re busy being glad she’s not expecting you to be five foot nine and stunning. You slide off the bed, finding your laptop and opening it.  “But that’s also good, that means this won’t be a surprise.”

“What?” She asks, and you hush her.

“Hang on, I’m finding something.”

You don’t want to send her to facebook, and you don’t have her email. Googling you isn’t going to turn up anything good, but you do have one idea, and she waits impatiently, fidgeting loudly, while you load the university website and click through a series of links. “Okay, do you have your phone there?”

“Yes?”

“Okay.” You read her the address at the top of your screen, describing each of the directories and trying to enunciate the random letters Silas chooses to use to identify its departments. It’s a long chain, and you have to read back some of the letters twice, but you know when it works because Carmilla makes a noise you’ve never heard before. You’re pretty sure it’s approving, and your ears start to burn.

“So this is you,” she says.

You’d send her the link to your journalism class’ last project, where you and each of your team mates had profiles included on the website. Yours doesn’t say much - you hadn’t been feeling too awesome at the time of writing - but the photo is from the beginning of the year, not long after you’d moved in, and you know it’s a good one.

“That’s me.” you agree. You have to clear your throat. “So now we’re even.”

 

* * *

 

                        

It doesn’t always feel like it, but life does continue on outside of your room. It’s hard to focus on class, group projects or even phone calls to your Dad, because you’ve found one loose thread in the enigma that is Carmilla Karnstein, and you forever want to keep following it, but you’ve learned the hard way that you aren’t a person who can function without ever leaving their bedroom.

You still have papers to submit and classes to attend and tutorials you can’t skip on pain of a visit from the Dean. You don’t always feel like doing those things, but you’re trying to remember about balance, and anyway, Carmilla sleeps through a lot of the day.

(Besides, you’re getting a feel for how she thinks about things, so sometimes when you’re walking in the Quad or petting the Summer Society’s three headed dog or arguing against a pre-determined universe, you have her quiet, acerbic commentary in your ear. You have to suppress some inappropriate smiles.)

But the hardest part is going back to your Lit class, and facing Danny. You never did answer her texts during that bad week, and so you never really made up your fight. Not that you were going to make it up all the way, you’d been pretty clear that you’d identified a fundamental incompatibility in your relationship, but she’s still your TA. You need to find a way to work through it and be at least civil.

It’s an excellent rationale, and very adult, and you convince yourself of both those things and then don’t attend class for a week. Carmilla’s apparent distaste for Danny doesn’t help anything.

And then there comes a day when you know you either need to attend a class or receive a Deanly visit, and it seems like maybe that’s the kick in the pants that you need to get back in that classroom. Carmilla is sleeping that morning, so you wrap yourself in rain gear for the localized thunderstorm that’s been plaguing the campus for three days and make the sprint to the Danvers building at the last possible moment.

It doesn’t help, and Danny spots you as you come into the room, right on the bell. You reflect that being soaking wet doesn’t do anything for making a quiet entrance, and your duck print raincoat - thanks Dad - isn’t the most subtle thing you’ve ever owned. But you ignore the empty seat Danny gestures to in favour of taking one in the second last row, even though you have to elbow your way past three others to get into it. You never did return her messages, and you're still not ready to concede your argument, so it's just better if there are no misconceptions about your relationship now.

 The class is on  _Lolita_ , and you’d started off by being uncertain about what it was doing in a Women in Literature class - not to mention hated the book - but the more Prof Bertram dissects the book, the more the links become clear. The theoretical protagonist may be male, but by the end of an hour, Edmund Bertram has made it more than clear that Humbert Humbert is the most unreliable of narrators, and the book is an interrogation of perceptions of women. You take notes frantically, trying to get every idea down, because you’ve avoided this class so much you’d forgotten how much you loved it, and now you remember.

Unfortunately, you want to get so much down that you’re still stuck scribbling sentences when class is dismissed, which makes it far too easy for Danny to pin you down as you’re leaving. You curse your short legs and their ineffectuality when it comes to making an escape.

“Hollis! Wait a moment, please.” she calls out, and you’re caught between pretending you didn’t hear and whatever awkward conversation you need to have. You wince, remembering the idea of balance, and let her catch up to you on the stairs.

“Hi, Danny,” you say reluctantly.

To her credit, she’s all business. “Hi. Listen, you didn’t return my calls, so I had to assign you to a group for your next project randomly.” She hands you a slip of paper with two names. “I did my best, but it was slim pickings, and class attendees get first choice, so.”

You look down at the two names and emails she’s handed you, and it could be worse but it could also be a lot better. SJ seems smart enough, if a bit disconnected, but Wilson Kirsch could win an award as a clueless - if harmless - frat boy.  

“Seriously, Kirsch?” you say, and she winces a bit, but holds firm.

“That’s what happens when you don’t pick your own team,” she says briefly, and okay, you probably deserved that.

“Thanks,” you say a bit begrudgingly, and she shrugs.

“No big. Take care of yourself, Laura.” and she walks away, leaving you at the doors to the Danvers building. It’s still raining cats and dogs, although at least not literally, and you sigh. You bury yourself back into your rain gear and start the walk back to your dorm block. It seems twice as long when the skies are opening and you feel like you’ve gained three inches from the mud attached to your hiking boots. You hope your father never finds out you walked outside alone in a thunderstorm.

You’re cold and cranky by the time you get back, the good mood from your class evaporating the more you brood on what Danny had told you and, in particular, the way Silas’s rain seems to fall at the exact right angle to get in your eyes and down the neck of your shirt. You stomp up the first two flights of stairs to your room before stomping becomes too much effort, and then you just tramp down the hallway hoping Lola Perry doesn’t politely kick your ass for walking mud down her hallways. She can’t possibly have bloodhound DNA, no matter what the rumors insist.

You peel your jacket off inside the door to your room, swearing at the zipper when it catches, and drop it to the floor. Your boots come off as well, and you take them immediately into the bathroom. They’re probably going to need to be hosed before their next outing, and you’re just flipping the switch to the kettle and trying to decide if your jeans are salvageable - they’re not - when the power goes out.

“Oh, crap on a cracker,” you curse, and try to remember where you put your flashlight. You’re digging around using your phone screen as a light when the sky flashes again, and thunder cracks so nearby you drop your phone. That’s when you hear something that sounds suspiciously like a whimper.

Oh, shit. Carmilla.

You forget the flashlight, just grabbing your phone and using its small light to illuminate the joining wall. It doesn’t tell you anything, and after a moment you hazard, “Carm?”

She doesn’t answer, and it’s hard to hear anything else over the noise of the storm outside. You crawl onto the bed, pressing up against the wall like it’s going to help you hear something, and then there’s another rumble of thunder and Carmilla yelps. It’s a short, sharp sound that cuts off abruptly, and yeah, now you can definitely hear her breathing, hard and far too fast.

Crap. Crap. You know she has a lot of anxiety issues, and now it sure sounds like she’s on the edge of a panic attack. You wish you’d known that storms were a trigger, you could have been here sooner, although how you’re meant to talk someone out of a panic attack through a wall is probably the one survival lesson your dad never quite got around to giving you.

But you have to try.

“Hey. Hey, Carm, can you hear me?” you ask softly. You’re trying to pitch your voice somewhere between soothing and audible, a tricky prospect when the skies are determined to drown you out. A particularly loud thunder clap is enough to make you cringe, and you try a little louder. “Hey, Carm? I was wondering if you’re okay over there? My lights just went out and I figure power is out, so I was just hoping you have candles or a flashlight or something? I’m happy to share.”

You don’t give her a chance to answer. Her breathing sounds harsh and painful, and you don’t expect a response. “Just let me know, okay? I have a bunch of flashlights from my Dad, but I figure you’re more of a candles kinda girl, right? You said you liked the stars, and with all that black, I figure you’d like the old-timey-ness of candles better.”

There’s no verbal response, but you hear the springs in Carmilla’s bed twinge. Her breathing sounds terrible, hard and fast, but you think she’s come closer, and that has to be positive.

“So, I finally went to my English class this morning,” you start. “We both know my attendance has been pretty crappy lately, right, and I don’t think I ever told you specifically but my friend LaF and I - do you know Laf? They’re a mad scientist type but they’re pretty awesome - sat down one day and worked out how many classes I have to take to pass in all my classes…”

You sit on your bed, in the dark and the storm, and tell Carmilla the story of how you and LaF worked out how many classes you had to attend. And then, because her breath is easing but she still sounds like a chain-smoker, you tell her about this morning’s class, and how Bertram is a bit of a rockstar in your eyes, and then, when you get a bit desperate, because the storm is taking a really long time to pass overhead or at least calm down, you tell her most of the plotline of  _Lolita_ , with a lot of commentary on what a shit Humbert Humbert is and how often he lies and misleads the reader.

The storm doesn’t leave, but after an hour or so, it eases.  And when the thunder stops sounding like someone trying to smash a door in, you stop being able to hear Carmilla’s breathing over the sound of the heavy rain.

“And he talks about her previous sexual encounters like they mean that theirs was consensual, and it’s just, ughhh, she’s barely of age and he’s in a position of power and he’s so consistently misleading, it makes me  _sick_  -”

“Cupcake.” She says, and her voice is even huskier than usual. She sounds like she needs a hot chocolate and a cuddle, not necessarily in that order. “I’ve read Lolita before, you know.”

“Oh.” You say lamely, and that’s hardly the point, so you try to ignore it, but - “Well, you could have said?”

“I could have,” she agrees, and you both sit there for a while, listening to her breathe. She clears her throat again, “I could have said, but I don’t deal so well. With stuff.”

You raise your eyebrows to no one, because this is the closest she’s ever alluded to her hermit-like existence. You’d talked about technical details of management - her food, her enrolment - without ever talking about the fact that she doesn’t actually ever leave.

And you don’t want to push, but you were tired when you got here and you’ve been sitting in a pair of wet jeans for an hour. “Stuff like going outside?”

She inhales, but she’s calm when she answers. “Among other things, yeah.”

You look down at your wet jeans and consider letting this go, changing into something dry and comfortable, but the lights are still out and at this point you’re not sure what you have to lose. “You wanna talk about it?”

She sighs. “Not really, but I figure you just talked me down, so you get to know.”

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to tell me,” you say, and it’s an awkward sentence that has you tripping over the words.

“Honestly? I’ve been expecting you to ask for a while now,” she says, and you can hear her fiddling with something on the other side of the wall. “Where are you?” she asks abruptly.

You blink. “On my bed, sitting with my back to the wall,” you say honestly, and she hums in acknowledgement.

“At the top or the bottom of the bed?”

“Middle to the bottom.”

You hear her moving again, the bedsprings singing their tired and worn-out squeak, and suddenly the questions make sense. She’s sitting behind you, her back to her side of the wall, as close as she can be. The knowledge is electric, but subdued somehow, because you know she’s struggling.

You listen to her breathe for a while. It’s measured, and slow, but intense somehow, and you think maybe it’s because you can tell how much effort is going into keeping it that way. She takes a while, but you’re not about to pressure her. Not about this.

When she speaks, it’s sudden, and flat, words shooting out as though from a gun. “After my family died the papers were all over me.You’re from Silas, so you would have seen. They were everywhere, and I was grieving and - stressed out - and after a while those two things started building on each other.”

She breathes in, heavy and uncomfortable, and you think she isn’t breathing when she speaks, but she goes on. “I was at school when it happened, but as soon as it did, the lawyers came swooping in to take me out of school and keep me away from the press. And it took me a while to understand, but when I did, I learned to be careful. Because every time I wasn’t, every time I went out, someone would be shoving a lens in my face. Or they wouldn’t, and I’d think everything was fine, and then there’d be another goddamn headline with some long distance photo and some horrible speculation. And I learned to stay inside. And I stayed and stayed, and then one day it turned out I was afraid to go outside at all.”

You wait for her to go on, but all you hear over the rain outside is that terrible breathing of hers. And what else could she tell you? You have the Cliffnotes of what must be among the world’s most painful stories, how much detail do you need to know what you’d already recognised, that the media had made her life a living hell?

“What happens when you go outside?”

She sighs, long and deep, but it isn’t the harsh breath of a moment ago. Now she just sounds tired, ready to sleep.

“When I go outside, it feels like everyone is looking at me. Whether there’s four people or four hundred. And I know that mostly they’re not, but sometimes they are, and I know I can’t tell with any sense of security. And so I get panicky, and then my skin prickles and I sweat and then I know people are actually looking and it makes it worse.”

She says it almost calmly, as though practice has taken all the horror out of it for her. It’s let her recite her symptoms sounding sleepy, almost bored, when you’ve just talked her down from a panic attack in the dark.

“It’s agoraphobia, basically. That part of it.” she says finally. “There’s more, but it’s all anxiety stuff, and that’s the worst of it. That sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“A panic attack,” you fill in for her, and you think she nods.

“Yes. I have panic attacks. And then sometimes I hyperventilate or throw up, and then people really are watching, and then…” she trails off.

“I never saw anything about that in the news,” you say, and you want to kick yourself for saying something so stupid. She's silent again for a long, long time.

“Well, cupcake. I have very good lawyers and all that. And like I told you, paying people large sums of money tends to get you your own way.”

 

* * *

 

  
  
After three days, Silas’s localised thunderstorm runs out of water, and it retreats into the local mountains to recharge its batteries, or possibly sulk. Campus opinion remains divided, but you’re just glad that it leaves so that Carmilla can get some sleep. 

She hadn’t panicked again once the lights came back on, but you could hear the strain in her voice each time the rainfall intensified. And you’d stayed up with her, because why not? It wasn’t like you weren’t in the habit of staying up to get things done, and you can even reason that Carm’s helping you with your philosophy papers. You might not be writing right this moment, but she’s full of ideas for your latest topic, referring you to book after book, only half of which she admits to currently stashing in her bedroom.

One of these days, you’ll ask how she gets library books brought to her - money might work for most things, but the library minions are meant to be immune to bribery. For now, you’ll settle for asking LaF about their recent lab exploits; you owed them after they got you through your stats exam, and you hadn’t even replied to their recent texts. When they’d texted you to grab a drink, you’d only paused to check the forecast before you said yes.

Now you’re in the bar, though, you’re having second thoughts. LaF is their usual entertaining self, and you’re always up to hear the truth of the latest bizarre rumours coming out of the Demikhov building, but their explanation of the centaur stories ranged somewhere between disappointing and wholly unconvincing. Also, you were somehow unaware that they were best friends with one RA Perry, or that she would be attending your drinks.

“I’m just glad the rain has eased up for now,” she says, intently scrubbing at a spot on the table top. “LaFontaine, can you pass me the salt? … Thank you. But at least with all the rain, people have stopped bringing mud into the building.”

She’s dripped some water from her drink onto the table and is using the salt LaF has passed her to scrub out the food stain. You’re too busy hoping you’re not going scarlet at the accusations to find it bizarre.

“I mean, really,” she goes on, finally finishing up on what’s probably a grease stain and moving onto what you can only assuming is some kind of alcohol stain, “One of the girls had filled a bathtub in the basement with mud. And I know, of course she had to get clean, but really wouldn’t it have been easier if she just hadn’t brought all the mud in to begin with? And it’s really very irresponsible to shower in your clothes, the water use would just be absurd.”

LaF had been making desperate apologetic eyes across the table at you, but at that they perk up. “Wait, was it that girl Namazu? With the catfish tattoos? I totally think she’s up to something weird.”

“Really, LaFontaine. You know I can’t tell you details about the students,” Perry says stiffly, and you raise your eyebrows to yourself. Probably for the best you hadn’t asked her about Carmilla, then.

They bicker back and forth for a while, and it’s cute and domestic but not something you want to get involved in, so you excuse yourself to buy another round of drinks. LaF waves some money at you, but Perry’s water drinking isn’t exactly breaking the bank, and you decline.

When you get back, Perry is smiling a rigid smile and LaF is scowling, but they’ve at least stopped squabbling. You’re wary of setting them off again, and you’re about to ask Perry for her carrot cake recipe (she’s notoriously fond of baking) when LaF jumps over the top of you and asks about Carmilla.

“Hey, what ended up happening with your weird neighbor? Did you ever find out what the deal was with her attending class?”

A shock runs the length of your spine, sparking from your fingertips and the base of your skull. You haven’t talked about Carmilla in weeks, not to LaF or anyone else. You’d thought they’d forgotten.

“Oh, really, LaFontaine.” Perry sighs. “All students have to attend classes.”

“But this girl never goes out,” LaF argues, and you wince inwardly because God, was this what you’d sounded like? “Tell her, Laura. She’s got some neighbor who doesn’t go out. I figure she’s either super famous or a vampire.”

This time you actually wince. “Jeez, LaF. It’s not that bad.”

You swig your drink to give yourself time, and pull an involuntary face because ugghhh, beer, but they’re both waiting on you now, LaF excited and Perry politely but brightly interested, the shine in her eyes matching the glint from her hair. You wish you were a better liar.

“I was wrong about that,” you say as casually as you can. “I ran into her a while back and it turned out she’d just been away for a while. She’s pretty cool, actually.”

LaF deflates almost immediately. “Oh come on Hollis! I thought we had a mystery on our hands!”

“Really, LaFontaine,” Perry says again, and she’s said it so many times this evening that you feel sorry for LaF, but at least they’re not talking about Carmilla any more. You don’t want to talk about her. Not with them.

“Well then, how are things going with Lawrence?” LaF asks, and you close your eyes and sigh.

 

* * *

 

 

When you get home, it’s early enough that Carmilla is still awake. You take off your shoes and jacket in the doorway before you knock lightly on her wall to make it clear you’re available.

There’s a rustling of bed covers, and you hear a heavy book spine squeak and close. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey, Carm. Sorry, were you asleep?”

She hums a little. “It’s early for me, cupcake.”

You wrestle with your belt, getting it undone before dropping your pants to the floor. You rummage among your bed covers for your pyjamas. “Yeah, but you’re in bed, right?”

“Mmmmm.”

She’s quiet while you’re changing, and she doesn’t really answer your question. You give her a moment, but when she still doesn’t say anything, you head into the bathroom to brush your teeth.

It isn’t as though you always talk. Sure, Carmilla asks often about your daily life, your friends, particularly your Dad, and it’s clear she misses a lot from the outside world. But she’s also used to being on her own, and has a lot of introverted habits. She sleeps a lot, far more than you, and is inclined to be quiet the rest of the time. During the thunderstorms, you realised that she’s also inclined to be quietly sad, and it hurts you to think how much time she may have spent borderline immobile and grieving before you knew she was there.

You look at your hands under the tap, and you wash them carefully, each fingernail in turn, before you wash your face. You dry both on a hand towel before you go back out to Carmilla.

“Are you okay?” you ask.

She sighs, and there’s a tapping noise, like fingers on cardboard. “Yeah. I, uh,” and there’s more background noises, more moving of bed sheets. “I missed you.”

You don’t even try to control the smile that creeps sideways across your face. Because you don’t want to talk to your friends about her, but she’s here, and she waited up for you, and she’s embarrassed. She’s actually squirming over telling you she missed you.

“I missed  _you_ ,” you say, and her sigh this time is of relief, and you’re glad you didn’t take the opportunity to tease her.

“I didn’t know if that was okay,” she says quickly, and you reach over and spread your hand against the wall.

“I miss you all the time,” you say, and maybe it’s the alcohol, but maybe it’s just the truth. “I miss you when I’m out, I miss you when I’m in class… when you’re asleep, sometimes. I miss you.”

She’s silent, and you read discomfort, frustration, anxiety into it. You lean your forehead against your hand on the wall, and you’re aching with what you want to say to her. If you could just see her face, just this one time, to know what she was thinking. That she was okay.

“I wish I could touch you,” she says finally, and it’s plaintive and discontent.

“I want to touch you,” you say.

Maybe it is the alcohol. Because you didn’t know you were going to say that, and now it’s big and scary and all embracing. Because you do. You do want to touch her. You want to touch her hair and her cheekbone and the skinny jeans she says she wears. You want to know if her jaw is still as sharp, her cheeks as hollow, as all those fucking photos made it look. You want to know if the skin on her arms is as soft as you think it must be. You want to soothe away every scar she has, and then yes, you want to touch her in exactly the way your words just made it sound like you do.

Her breathing is quicker, now, faster in a way you’ve learned to associate with anxiety, but is now, maybe, something else. You want to touch her, yes, absolutely, but if you could touch her you could just see her face and you think maybe you want that more than anything.

“Tell me…” and her voice is so low, so soft, it breaks. “Tell me how?” she asks again, and it vibrates with the effort it takes her to ask.

You close your eyes, your head still against your hand, trying so hard to be near her. You’re kneeling on your bed, touching the wall, so close to being able to touch her.

You want that, but you don’t know if you’ll be able to tell her.

“I want to touch your face,” you tell her. It’s soft, barely more than you’d use to speak directly into her ear, but she’s so silent and the walls are so goddamned thin. She would have heard you changing, a moment ago, and the knowledge charges something in you. “I want to touch your hairline and your ear and your cheekbones… god, Carmilla, they always look so sharp. I want to know if they’ll make me bleed.”

She’s silent, so intent she’s still with it. Making none of the thousand tiny movements you’ve learned to associate with her.

“I’d run my fingers over your cheek,” you tell her. “... I’m right handed, so it would be your left cheek. And then I’d touch your eyebrows with both of my thumbs, because the arch is just… enthralling. And I’d touch your eyelids, so lightly, because it’s scary. And your mouth…”

You surprise yourself by shuddering. “I want to touch that most of all. I’d trace your lips with my fingertip, just one, because I want to concentrate. The outline of your lips, and then each one. The join of your mouth. The tip of your tongue.”

She moans, and she moves, and you’ve heard both before and you haven’t talked about it and oh god, you know you both know. You spread your fingers wider on the wall, knowing how you’d touch her, light and soft but insistent, wanting.

“Laura,” she says. “Laura, Laura,” and it’s only your name but it’s everything.

“Is this okay?”

“Yes. Please.”

“I’d slide my hands from your face, Carm. Trace the back of your neck, really slow. I love the curve of it, necks are beautiful, and you’re so fine boned. And then I’d tuck my thumb into the back of your shirt and stroke the top of your shoulders.”

“It tickles,” she says.

“Yes, it does,” you agree. “And I’d tease you like that before running my hands down the length of your back and pulling your shirt off from the bottom. Your hair would go everywhere, all over both of us, because it’s so fine, and I’d love it, Carm. I’d love having part of you all over me.”

You pause, and you can hear that quick breathing again, but there’s nothing harsh in it. And you take a risk, another one, because you’ve taken so many tonight and what’s one more?

“Do you have a shirt on?”

Her response is slow in coming, languorous. “Yes.”

You bite your lip. “Will you take it off for me?”

“... Yes.”

You wait until something hits the ground, and you swallow.

“Are you wearing a bra?”

“No.”

“Mmmm, that’s nice,” you hum. “I like that. So I’d put my hands on your waist, and my hands are always a little cold but they’d warm up so fast on your skin, Carmilla. Does that feel good?”

“You feel good,” she confirms on an exhale, and oh god, your heart rate should be illegal.

“So I’d… I’d slide my hands up slowly, cup your lowest ribs and feel the way they press against my palms. You’re so little, Carm, I’d be able to feel you breathing,” and you’re imagining every part of it, holding her breath between your palms. “And then I’d loosen a little, just enough so my hands skim every bit of your skin, and I’d reach up and cup your breasts.”

At that, she moans again, and again, twice in quick succession and it’s so much louder, so much needier than before. You’re still talking so softly, so intimately, that you have to raise your voice voice over her now, still crooning into her ear.

“I’d cup your breasts, and my hands are small, but they’d be perfect for you. I’d just hold you, and then I’d lift up a little, and just tease you with my palms. Just brush over your nipples, again and again. Has anyone done that to you?”

“No,” she says. “No one’s ever…”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes,” she says, and you can hear her shifting against her sheets. “Please, Laura.”

“That’s good. Good, Carmilla. But then I’d take one hand away, just one, and I’d slide it down your belly. Really slow. Can you do that?” You take her groan as your answer. “I hope you’re being slow. I want to feel the muscles in your stomach quiver, the way they twitch when I touch you. I love how you can’t control it.”

She’s breathing hard, and you take your own hand to your stomach, touching lightly. You’re still in your pyjamas, but you can feel your own muscles shake.

“What pants are you wearing, Carm?”

“Um,” and her breathing is so ragged, it takes her a moment. “Uh, sweatpants.”

“What colour?”

“Who cares?” she‘s impatient, but relents. "Dark grey."

You add it to your mental image, your fingers restless on your stomach. God, you're so ready. “Underwear?” you ask.

“Yes… black.”

“Mmmmmmmm. So I’d slide my hand down your belly still further, my hand flat against you, and then I’d slip it under your waistband and right inside your underwear.”

She whimpers, honest to God whimpers, and you think you may have died because nothing else has ever felt this extreme. Your hand plays at the top of your own pyjama pants, just slipping inside the band, and you think you’re teasing yourself as much as her now.

But you have to ask, and somehow, this is the moment at which you get shy. “Are you…”

“I’m wet,” she says, and it’s you who moans, loud and uncontrolled.

“God, Carm.” You’ve barely been touching yourself, but you’ve been thinking about touching her, and your hand is inside your underwear now and you are so hot and slick and ready for it.

“Are you…?” She asks, uncertain, and you swallow your whimper to answer her.

“I’m touching myself… God, I’m so wet for you.”

You try and steady your breathing, but it feels like sparks fly every time you touch your clit. “Carm, I... ,” and you have to take your fingers off yourself to be able to concentrate. “I… okay, so I’m going to run my fingers against you, just testing, and then I’m slipping into you just a little, just enough so my fingertips are slick. And then I’m going to touch your clit, really soft, to see what you like. Is that good?”

“It’s good,” she says, and the words are catching in her throat, halfway broken. You can hear her moving on the bed, hips starting to twitch, and you want to touch her, you want to make her writhe.

“What do you like?”

She exhales sharply, frustrated, but then confides, “Soft at first, then firmer. But strokes, not circles.”

“Mmmmmm, okay. So I’m going to stroke you, really lightly. Your clit mostly, but around it too.” You start touching yourself again, involuntarily. “You’re so soft, sweetheart. Are your fingers slick? I want them really wet, I want this to feel so good, so dip them inside yourself for just a sec, okay?”

Her moan is deep and guttural, all the answer you need. You’re rubbing yourself now, the way Carmilla likes it rather than the way you do, but oh god, it doesn’t matter because it feels amazing.

“Good girl. Oh God, Carm, you’re so wet, you feel so good. But I’m going to pull back a little, I’m going to rub your clit like you said, really firm strokes up and down. And it’s really hard, baby, you must be so sensitive,” and she’s gasping next door, barely six inches away from you and desperate. She’s rocking her hips into her hand, the bedsprings squeaking louder than you’ve ever heard. “I’m touching you, Carm, I’ve got my finger on your clit and I’m tugging up your hood to press harder and oh god I can feel you pulsing underneath me, I can feel your heartbeat and you’re so hot against me and I love it, I love touching you and I want you to feel so good - “

She cries out when she comes, an uneven noise that breaks halfway through and becomes a groan, a sound you’ve heard before but never so loud. You scrape the tip of your nail across your clit and that’s enough, that and her cry, and you’re coming in a wave that floods your underwear and pulses in your toes and leaves you limp and spent.

“Carm,” you gasp, and lean your head against the wall, and it’s cool and hard and not her skin.

“Laura, Laura,” and you think she must feel your sudden desperation, because she adds, “I’m here, Laura. I’m here.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Afterwards, you’re both a little shy. You have to untwist yourself from where you’ve melted against the wall, and then you have to explain what you’re doing to Carmilla. She didn’t know where you were, of course. It hadn’t exactly come up.

But you clean up a little, and when you’re done, you lie down in your bed. And you’re so lazy and comfortable that when you close your eyes, it feels like the wall doesn’t exist. When you’re warm and half asleep and Carmilla’s murmuring endearments in your ear, the wall seems like the least substantial thing in the world.

You’re just starting to doze, the lassitude in your muscles sending you gently sleepwards, when something in her tone catches your attention just enough to interrupt that inexorable tide.

“Laura,” she murmurs. “Laura, I need to… sweetheart?”

You blink sleep out of your eyes, smacking your lips where your mouth has hung open on the pillow. “Mmmm?”

There’s a long pause, and it seems like she’s changed her mind. “Nothing. Sorry, sweetheart. Go back to sleep.”

You blink again, conscious of a rising warmth at her calling you sweetheart, but suppress it for the moment. “It doesn’t sound like nothing.”

She sighs, and now she’s hesitant in a way you haven’t seen in weeks. “It’s just… this is good. And I don’t want you to think I’m freaking out or anything, because I’m not. I just... I think you should get to know? That I, I’ve never…”

“Never?” you say, and you’re still very dopey and it takes you far too long to work it out. “Oh. Ohhhh.”

And yet you can’t quite believe it. “Really, never?”

She scoffs, and you think that there’s hurt in it. “I don’t exactly go on many dates, creampuff.”

You absorb that gradually. This is new, this is not what you expected, and yet… what does it change, really?

“That’s okay.”

“Yeah?” And she’s uncertain still, but that hurt tone from a moment ago has faded.

“Yeah, Carm. Everything is fine.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for how long I was gone, folks. So sorry. I hope this extra long chapter will help make up for it. 
> 
> And as always, you can hit me up on [geoclaire on tumblr](https://www.geoclaire.tumblr.com)


	5. Chapter 5

You’re in the stairwell when your father calls. Not that you don’t expect it, really. He’s held onto you pretty tightly since your mother died, and going away to college has only toned down, not negated, that tendency.

You haven’t called him back since that bad week, either. He had called a couple of times, and somehow it had always been at a bad time. You’d put him off with text messages, explaining you were busy or in a class or working on something, you were totally a-plus super-duper better than okay, you just couldn’t talk, but now he’s calling again and this time you can’t really justify avoiding the father who loves you, has bodily protected you against all harm, and is currently funding your college education and residence.

So you answer the phone.

“Dad! Hi!” You do your best to sound as cheerful as you can when you’ve just climbed four flights of stairs and are trying not to gasp for breath. You don’t need him worrying about whether you’re fit enough to run away from an attacker.

“How’s my baby girl?” he asks, “Can you talk to your old Dad? Don’t have a class or a deadline to run to?”

You half-smile at his tone. He’s teasing, but you’re guilty because you know you’ve been avoiding him. You glance down the hallway to your room, opt to walk towards the common room instead.

“No, no. Now’s good, I don’t have class for a bit,” you say, and lean your shoulder against a wall. There’s other students there, but they’re mostly studying, a few playing Jenga in a corner, so it shouldn’t be too loud.

“Good! Tell me everything,” your dad directs, and your smile turns into a wince.

 

* * *

 

You don’t get off the phone for forty five minutes, and it’s only by repeatedly hitting buttons and claiming it’s the sound of your battery running out that you escape. You love your father, you do, but he worries about things he shouldn’t, and worse, things he should, and that means that you spent more of the conversation than you like lying to him.

You’re managing fine, but your life does not stand up to the kind of scrutiny that suggests you should have a weekly meal plan and a sleep tracking app. You’re nineteen, you don’t always eat three meals. Heck, you don’t always sleep. And so his planning seems over the top, even faintly ridiculous, but he’s your dad and you feel guilty every time you massage the truth to something he’ll be comfortable with.

You percolate on that on the couch in the common room for a good half hour before you talk yourself into going back to your room. It isn’t until the Jenga players start getting raucous, and then a couple starts making out on the far end of your couch (ew) that you stop contemplating your failures and find it in you to walk down the corridor to your room.

For once, you’re hoping Carmilla is asleep. It’s five, and that’s late even by her standards, but it wouldn’t be unique. You let yourself in, and for once, you don’t tap on her wall to see if she’s there. You just busy yourself unloading your laptop and books, because you’ve already lost enough time this evening and you have a lit paper coming due. Not your group project, thank Christ, but something on _Lolita_.

“Laura?”

You close your eyes. Not asleep.

“Hey, Carm.”

You keep unloading your things. Normally, you’d sit on the bed to talk to her - it makes it easier to hear her, and you like knowing that she’s so close - but right now you don’t feel able to settle in like that.

“What’s up?” she asks.

You jerk your head to the wall. “Nothing’s up, why would something be up?”

You hear her get up and move, pacing along your shared wall. “Cupcake, I was just asking how your day was. Although now I’m pretty sure something _is_ up.”

Holy shit.

“No - no, nothing is up,” you insist, shaking your head intently. “I just - I have this essay due tomorrow and I’m not where I want to be and my head is just, ugh, a mess, and I don’t, I mean… my head’s not in the game,” you finish lamely.

She sighs loudly from her side of the wall, emphasising it so she knows you can hear.

“Well, I guess that’s a reasonable excuse to miss out on my company,” she says playfully. She sobers, and adds, “You know, it’s okay when you don’t have time to talk.”

You wince, because she’s being kind, and you don’t want her to need to be kind to you. You don’t deserve it, not when you spent an hour avoiding your father’s questions and any mention of her. And not when you’re freaking out about it because for the first time, you just lied to her.

“I just - I want to be available for you,” you say weakly, and she laughs at you.

“And I like you being available to me, but you can’t always be.” she says.

Yeah, that’s what’s bugging you. Because you want to be a lot of things to her, but you’re realising that no, you can’t always be.

You don’t get a lot of sleep that night, although you do get your essay done. Carmilla is true to her word and doesn’t bother you all evening, except to say a quick and quiet goodnight when she goes to bed.

You’re glad about the essay, anyway. Your lit grade could use some work, and you’re not particularly confident on how well your group project is going to turn out. But your essay isn’t too hard, not when you’d talked to Carm about your thesis on unreliable narrators before. She’d gotten you to read _Code Name Verity_ as your additional text, and while the main characters couldn’t have been more different, you’d been able to draw links between the two texts quite easily. Not to mention the compare-and-contrast that Maddie’s component of _Code Name Verity_ had allowed you.

You print off the document around five, and you probably should sleep now, but you’re finally feeling on top of things. So you make another mug of cocoa, and launch into your stats assignment, because for once you feel like you’ve got this and you are not about to let the opportunity slide.

You knock it out in record time before you head to class, dropping off assignments and crunching through a cookie breakfast as you go.

 

* * *

 

It’s a couple days before you manage to catch SJ after class. You’d been on the lookout for her so that you could start your group project, but it seems she’d chosen against attending your first two classes that week. Inconvenient, especially given Kirsch was more than willing to talk through your project with you earlier in the week, but it’s not like you’re in a position to be judging.

“Hey!” you call, trotting after her in the hallway.

She spares you a glance, before slowing her pace and letting you catch up. “Hello. Hollis, right? I suppose you want to talk about this project?”

You speedwalk to try and keep up with her heels. “Yeah, we don’t have that much time and I figure we need some kind of plan of attack? Kirsch was coming up with ideas the other day, but uh - “ you try to phrase your objection politely, but S.J. interrupts.

“Frankly, I’ve met smarter sandwiches.”

“Uh - ” That’s probably a little unfair. “Um, let’s say I wanted to talk to you first about our approach. I started something the other night, and I think it could work as a, uh, plan of attack,” and you dig around in your backpack and hand her an outline of your proposed presentation.

She finally stops walking long enough to stop and look over your notes, and you gratefully lean against the wall. You haven’t been sleeping much, and you get out of breath so easily, even though you don’t feel tired.

SJ scans through your notes quickly, and when she’s finished, she looks over the top of them at you.

“It looks like you’ve planned this out already,” she notes. You don’t think she’s displeased, but her manner is very dry.

“Uh, yeah. I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to meet up, and we have to present in like ten days, so it seemed practical.”

She gives you another long look. “Okay,” she says eventually. “I’m fine to break down post colonialism as an intro. Kirsch should be able to describe the parallels between _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Foe_ , as long as you’re the one who does the comparative analysis and draws out the themes.”

Well, yeah. Kirsch is a sweet guy - sweeter than you’d thought - but you’re not about to hand over the majority of your remaining grade to his ability to interpret analogy.

“Not a problem,” you assure her.

She nods sharply. “Okay. We should meet after class on Monday. Try to have your material ready then,” she directs, and you agree, but it leaves you a little resentful. Aren’t you the one who’s been trying to make this happen all week?

She stalks off, her heels clicking a swift rat-a-tat on the tiles, and it’s only when you text Kirsch the details of your meeting that you realise she didn’t even give you her number.

 

* * *

 

“... and then she asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around her yes and drew her down to me so she could feel my breasts all perfume and her heart was going like mad yes I said yes I will yes.”

You moan as you finish, Carmilla’s voice surrounding you like a spell and coaxing more pleasure from you. Heat had pooled low in your belly the longer she read to you, and now when you roll over, it’s as though all that gentle warmth has soaked itself through all of your joints.

“Did you like that?” she asks gently after a moment. You can hear a gentle tapping, her fingertips along the wall.

You roll your head in her direction, lazy. “Where on earth did you read _that_?”

She laughs, and you love the sound of it. “Some queer women online thought it be fun to change the pronouns around in _Ulysses_. I think it was possibly a reaction to the genderswap of _Twilight_ , but I liked it an awful lot better.” A beat. “I think you did too.”

You groan, and she laughs at you again. She’s still shy when it comes to this, when the two of you have sex, but she’s been breaking out, too, finding ways to express herself without needing to be explicit about the ways she wants to touch you.

It doesn’t matter that she can’t yet enunciate the ways she wants to have you. Her low voice, the confidence she’s beginning to gain when it comes to these interactions… they’re more than sexy enough. She always gets you there.

You groan again when you see the time on your phone. Then you roll your legs over the side of the bed, finding your pants and beginning to pull them back on.

“Time to go?” she asks.

There’s uncertainty in her tone, and it makes you pause. If you think about it, you wouldn’t be leaving this soon if the two of you were in the one bed.

“Yeah, I have a TA meeting shortly.” You hesitate. “I’m sorry, I know I’m being… rude.”

She sniffs, and you know it’s the placeholder for while she’s thinking, the same way that you bite your lip.

“If you have a meeting, you have a meeting,” she says, and it’s too clear that she’s letting you off the hook. It makes you feel worse.

“Carm, really, I’m sorry. I didn’t think we’d be… I just came to swap my books,” you try to explain. “I wasn’t expecting you to jump me.”

She laughs, and it takes the tightness from her voice. “Hard to jump you through a wall, sweetheart,” she says.

“Yeah, I know.” You say. You look around for your shoes, tugging them on quickly. “Maybe, someday…” you start to suggest, but think better of it. You’re running out the door, and it’s absolutely not the time.

“Maybe.” She says, but it’s flat. You hate how quickly you’ve managed to turn this around.

“I’m sorry, Carm,” you say again. “I didn’t mean to… That was stupid.”

She hums after a moment, an accepting sound, and your shoulders drop. Forgiven, for now.

You glance again at the clock. “And I’m really sorry that I really, really have to go. Danny’s expecting me.”

“Wait, you’re seeing Danny?” she asks, and you frown.

“Yes? She’s my TA, remember? Carm, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

You feel completely shitty about leaving her. You really do, it’s totally crappy timing on your part and it’s just downright rude after what you guys just did. But you also hadn’t planned to slot in a quickie before your TA meeting, and now you have to hightail it across half of campus to be remotely close to on time.

In fact, you probably didn’t have time to have even that much of a conversation, because you’re still across the road from the Danver’s building when you spot Danny’s red hair outside, heading rapidly away from the building and in the direction of the caf. You swear, and dash across the street.

“Danny!”

There’s a screech behind you, and a bang, and you’re not sure if it’s that or your shout that has Danny turning. Her eyes meet yours, then scan quickly behind you, and her face tightens before she grabs your arm and all but drags you from the road.

“What the _fuck_ , Laura.”

You’re confused, because you’re late, but this seems like an over reaction. You let her drag you a few steps, her face like a thundercloud.

“Sorry, sorry, I know I’m late, I just - I got stuck at the dorm, and then - “

Danny drops your arm, and you try to rub it subtly with your other hand. It isn’t easy with your satchel over your shoulder, but you manage. But when you look up, she’s just staring at you.

“You were late, so you ran in front of traffic? You nearly got hit by a car!”

“I did not!” you object immediately. “I was nowhere near a car!”

Danny closes her eyes, frustration clear on her face, and you can actually hear her exhale.

“You clearly didn’t even look, that car just burned rubber avoiding you - okay. You know what? Forget it. What did you want to talk about?”

She’s pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and middle finger, and when she takes them away, you see how red the skin is. And then you take in the barely concealed stress on her face, and you feel worse. Because she’s your TA, and this is the relationship you’re meant to have, but you’ve never really talked since the night you, well, _talked_.

“It’s not important,” you try, but when she looks at you her eyes flash a warning. Okay, so lying about it isn’t going to help. “Uh, actually, it’s about the group project. SJ seems fine, but I’m not sure Kirsch is, uh, totally getting the depth in the readings.”

Danny sighs, and it’s long and heavy but this time you don’t think it’s about you.

“He’s totally trying, but I just feel like we’re probably missing things?” You tack on hopefully. Maybe if you can move this conversation back to talking about books, something she’s knowledgeable and comfortable with, it’ll start getting easier.

She sighs again, and gestures to you to start walking.

“Last week in tutorial, he described Coleridge’s relationship with God as being comparable to the information superhighway,” she says conversationally. “I don’t know what the hell he’s been reading about the internet or how he thinks it’s relevant, but I’m going to need coffee for this.”

 

* * *

 

Danny’s talk helps, but it’s getting near the end of semester, and so you still have heaps of other work. Sometimes you miss being in highschool, when a weekend actually meant a break, but then you’d also lived at home and had a curfew and struggled to interact with other humans without your father’s supervision. Also, you hadn’t met Carmilla, or LaFontaine, or even Danny, and even though some of those relationships are complicated, you have no regrets about them being in your life.

And besides, even though you can’t think of the last time you slept through the night and work is piling up on you in ways that probably breach the Geneva Convention, it’s not like you feel tired. Stressed, sure, but you’re also mostly at least a little excited about your classwork. There’s always something in it that captures your interest, some small or large factoid that makes you want to know every last iota about a subject, and makes it seem easy to sit up and type til dawn.

Even Carmilla had commented on the energy you’ve found lately, and the hours you keep. Even by her standards, she thought your hours were unusual.

Of course, that was when she was still talking to you.

Well, not that she isn’t? Not exactly. It’s just that things have been, if not quite awkward then certainly a little weird, since you had to run off immediately after you guys had had sex.

And you get that, you really do, because it was insensitive and you should have warned her how little time you had and basically you bailed on pillow talk and behaved like a jerk. And you knew those things, so you’d acknowledged all of them and apologised to Carmilla, and it had certainly helped, but it feels like things are still a little weird. Like something is still bothering her, and until you put your finger on it, you can’t help.

In the meantime, you get Carmilla’s version of the silent treatment, which mostly means she reads and sleeps a lot and doesn’t seem to want to connect the way she usually does. She particularly seems to be sleeping more than usual, and you’ve noticed before that that’s how she tends to deal with stress. Like now, it’s only just gone two thirty, and she’s been asleep for an hour or more - it isn’t like her, and you worry. There just isn’t anything you can do right now, not unless she’s secretly hankering for another box of your double chocolate chunk cookies.

You briefly contemplate popping out and planting a box of those on her front step, but you’re pretty sure that’s not going to fix anything. Instead, you sigh, and before you can think about it, pull up your web browser.

Since you swapped pictures, google image searching Carmilla has become a guilty pleasure of yours. Not too guilty, because she explicitly said she didn’t mind you doing it, but a little bit, because even with her permission, it is so obvious that some of these photos were taken without her consent. At a distance, over a fence, through a wide angle lens, over a range of ages and locations, starting from a chubby cheeked toddler in someone’s arms and progressing through her school years.

She gets skinnier through the pictures, you notice. It’s not immediately obvious, because google brings them up in no particular order, but you’ve looked through these enough to notice the pattern. Her hair gets darker, she collects and then discards piercings. And of course, in the earlier ones she’s usually part of a group, not the sole focus. Just one of the Karnstein siblings, only of interest as the daughter or little sister of her more attention-grabbing family members, right up until she’s the last one. And then, of course, the number of photos explodes, right as her companions all seem to disappear.

You scowl at the thought. It’s a familiar one, and of course the reasons behind the pattern are obvious, depressingly so. But it always bothers you, and so you hit the button for the next page of pictures with maybe more vehemence than is called for.

These you’ve seen less, and so you pay them closer attention. They’re a little older, pictures that now get fewer uses and hits as news websites swap to newer images, and a few that you haven’t seen at all. There’s one of her with a cat that you find quite sweet, curled up in the corner of a media announcement of her mother’s and clearly utterly disinterested. Another, and she’s in an elegant dark red dress, and you wonder if it was her prom or just another family party, and it doesn’t matter because she is just so beautiful, her hair up and her skin glowing.

This beautiful girl, and you get to talk to her and be with her and look at her like this. You smile a little and save that file to a hidden folder on your laptop. Because yes, it’s a guilty pleasure, but you love looking at how beautiful Carmilla is.

You flick back to your browser, and perhaps you should click further back in the results more often, because there’s a few that you haven’t see before. Carmilla on a swing, Carmilla hugging her brother after some kind of car race, Carmilla in a green blouse and laughing. Carm in a grey blouse and looking entirely pissed off. Carmilla holding the hand of a blonde girl.

… wait, what?

You scroll back up, and yeah, that’s Carmilla holding the hand of another girl. You click for a better image, and then there’s the site address on the right, and it’s some horrible news site that your lecture would only ever bring up to criticize, and if you had any decency you’d close the tab now because this is stupid and invasive and horrible, but you click because that picture is only a couple of years old, and Carmilla is holding that girl’s hand.

It’s the first picture when the page loads, the headline some clickbait bullshit you’d be embarrassed to be responsible for. But by then your eyes have already slipped down the page, and there’s the girl again, another picture of her smiling shyly at the camera, and her name is Ell and she’s talking about their relationship.

Their relationship.

Her relationship with Carmilla.

You feel acid rise in your stomach, burning in your guts and your throat. Because Carmilla had said she’d never had a girlfriend, but now here’s this girl calling herself that and then talking about the Karnstein family and Carmilla’s inheritance. There’s pictures of her inside the house, even with a portrait of Will. She even talks about Carmilla’s hospitalization after the deaths, something you’d never known about until you’d started talking to Carmilla.

The burning sensation in your guts is only getting worse, nausea seeming to batter you in waves, but you can’t let it go now. It is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done when you open another tab and google ‘Ell Oberempt’ and ‘Carmilla Karnstein’. After that, the internet is a kaleidoscoping wormhole of junk articles and nasty speculation and long distance photographs, and you fall right into it. You read it all, and every word makes you feel sicker.

 

* * *

 

When morning comes, you haven’t slept, but then that’s getting to be a habit. The acid burning in your stomach is something new, but presumably antacids exist for a reason.

You’re still sitting at your computer, staring blankly at the screen, when your phone rings. You pick it up on automatic, not even glancing down before you answer.

“Hello?”

“Hiya, sweetie!”

It’s your Dad again. Your wonderful, caring, truly beloved father, who you absolutely do not want to talk to right now. You cringe.

“Hey, Daddy,” you say. “How are you?”

He hums, clearly pleased. “I’m great, honeybunch! I’m so glad I got you, I didn’t know if you’d be awake yet, but I figured Saturday was a good time to talk since you won’t have classes to dash off to.”

Now, you wince. He’s chosen a hell of a time to start using good logic as to your schedule and plans. When you were in high school he was as likely to call you at two pm on a school day as midnight on the weekend and demand to know your whereabouts, and you should be pleased there’s some logic behind his timing now, but instead you just want to fall face first onto your bed. Maybe that could lift the weight that seems to be sitting over your heart.

“Laura?”

You’ve been silent for too long. “Yeah, Daddy, I’m here.” You glance at the clock on your bedside table, and ugh, it’s barely seven thirty and there’s no way you can claim you have a study group or brunch or anything right now. “Sorry, I just woke up. Haven’t had my cocoa yet.”

He laughs. “Well, you should probably get on that, I know what you’re like before you’ve had your sugar in the morning. Don’t forget to take your vitamin and psyllium too!”

The vitamins and psyllium you tossed into your waste basket your second week on campus. Maybe they could have helped your stomach right now. “Sure, Dad. I’m on it.”

You get up from your desk, your thighs screaming from where you’ve been sitting crosslegged on a desk chair for hours, and stagger to your tiny kitchen. You wash out a mug and find some cocoa and the last of your not-quite-bad-yet milk, and prepare your mug while your Dad chatters in your ear about his lawn and the conversation - not an argument, sweetie! - he’s having with the neighbor about the dandelions in his front yard.

“And of course he should do what he wants, it’s his yard, but the seeds keep blowing onto our lawn, and - is that your kettle whistling, sweetheart? Remember not to burn yourself on the steam - and then we get dandelions growing, and it’s just something we need to manage.”

“Mmmm,” is your contribution to the conversation. You hate the way he talks about ‘our’ yard and what ‘we’ need to do, like you haven’t moved out of home and you’ve just gone out for a little while. You pour the hot water into your mug, and stare at your shared wall, waiting for the cocoa to cool down.

“Sorry, sweetie. You know how it bugs me to see our hard work go down the drain.” He pauses, probably moving around the house the way he always does on the phone, and you drag your eyes from the wall to your mug again. “Speaking of hard work, how’s that english project coming? Are you going to bring home straight A’s again?”

Your smile feels more like a wince. “We don’t really… it’s going well. I have this big presentation with two other people on Friday, and I’m kinda worried about it, one of the girls just doesn’t seem to be that engaged and I’m worried she won’t hold up her ends of things.”

“Oh, well. That’s not so good, but I’m sure you’ve got it covered, sweetie. You’re so good at coming through these things, you always manage what you need to do.”

You wrinkle your nose at the pep talk, but he means well. You find your eyes are on the wall again, and you drag them away, going over to sit on your bed with your back to it instead. You drag your knees up to your chest, in case that helps with your stomach. “Thanks, Daddy. I know we’ll sort it out, the other guy in the group is trying really hard, so we should get there.”

“That’s my girl, I know you can earn that A,” he declares, and his pride in you is inspiring, really. It’s just that more than half of your attention is on the wall behind you, hoping against hope that Carmilla will make a sound that tells you she’s awake. But what would you say to her?

“How’s everything else on campus? Do I need to send you more money?”

“No, no. Everything’s okay, the weekly stipend is getting me through,” you reassure him. “I buy groceries once a fortnight and cook a couple times, so it goes reasonably far.”

He hums. “Are you sure, sweetheart? That doesn’t sound like you’d be eating enough vegetables, they wouldn’t be so good at the end of the fortnight. I hope you aren’t living off of cookies again?”

You determinedly look away from both the empty packets in your bin, and the wall behind you. “It’s fine, Dad. I eat in the Caf when I’m running low on fresh food.”

“Well, okay. Anything else I should know about?”

His voice has taken on a hinting tone, and you’re not sure what he’s getting at.

“No…?” you answer.

“You sure? It sounded like you were pretty close with your TA for a while there. Not that that’s necessarily a good idea, but she sounded pretty special.”

Suddenly you’re glad there’s no noise behind you. This is the last conversation you want to be having where Carmilla can hear. You get up and go to your window, looking out over the Quad below.

“No, nothing’s happening there. It maybe kinda was, but… not any more.”

“Oh, well. That seems like a pity, even if it’s maybe for the best. Unless there’s someone else in the picture?” He teases out gently.

You freeze, your hand clenching around the phone so tight you think the plastic might have cracked. “What gave you that idea?”

Your aggressive tone surprises even you, and your Dad is no less taken aback.

“Sweetie, I didn’t mean anything by it, I just wanted to know if you were seeing anyone else, uh, instead. If that might have been why you broke up.”

“No. That wasn’t it,” you tell him. You want badly to move on. “It wasn’t anything like that.”

He hums, clearly trying to downgrade the tension that’s suddenly arrived in the conversation. “You know it’s not a big deal to me, baby. I don’t mind if you have a girlfriend.”

You close your eyes, and you try not to see tabloids and headlines and photographs and a blonde girl on the back of your eyelids. You try not to feel sicker. You try.

Because you can’t talk about this right now, you can’t talk about dating and girls with your Dad. Not without talking about crappy journalism and invasions of privacy and long distance photographs. And you can’t talk about her right now, not out of nowhere and not when everyone recognises her name and not with all of this new history and not when you don’t know where you stand.

You try to sound normal when you say, very softly, “No, Dad. I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

"Well, that's a shame, sweetheart, but I'm sure it won't be that way forever! Your mother and I didn't meet until last year of college, you know, and we each had our fair share of bad luck stories..."

Your father means well, and more than that he means to comfort you. But your head is spinning and you can't hear what he's saying. And then you do hear something, and that’s worse, because now you’re desperately afraid that it was the sound of Carmilla throwing back her sheets on the other side of your shared wall.

"You'll find your wife eventually, Laur. I'm sure of that." Your Dad finishes, and you wish it was reassuring.

"Uh huh, thanks Dad. I love you, I gotta go."

For once, you don't wait for him to wrap up, you don't even wait for him to speak. You just hang up the phone and drop it as you crawl onto your bed. And you lean your face against the wall, press your hands like they might somehow reach to her, like they might hold onto her.

"Carm?" You ask. You can hear her breathing.

But the only response is quiet footsteps, and then the sound of her bathroom door closing.

 

* * *

 

You spend the weekend hiding out in Laf's room.

Under the circumstances, it seems like the best thing you can do. Once you’d spent the better part of a morning hoping and then pleading for Carmilla to just speak to you, you get the message. She isn’t ready to talk about what she heard you say. So the best thing you can do is grant you both some space, but you’re the only one who can leave.

And anyway, you’re not sure what you want to say at all. Because what she heard you say to your father - okay, that’s bad, but you can talk it out. Because what else were you supposed to say?

And then there’s everything that you need to say to her. To ask her. To have her clear up.

Because a solid part of you simply wants to howl _you lied to me_ , to scream it out, to castigate her and fling blame. But it isn’t safe to be angry with her, not like that, and you don’t know how else you can talk to her when you are so desperately shocked and hurt.

That part of you wants only to question her, to beg and plead until she explains and makes this feeling go away. Because you are angry but you’re more hurt, and you don’t know what to do with any of it.

So you grant the only mercy you can, and give both of you space. LaF is confused but amenable, and you let their science talk wash over you in waves that barely breach your surface. You feel numb, noise and light and everything but the nausea that’s bathed you since Friday night are all so very far away.

On Sunday Laf’s concern becomes pressing, because you don’t seem to be doing better and because they have to go out for the evening. Another date, you think, and you still can’t talk about Carmilla but you also can’t go home. And so you lie to them, make an effort of putting on a better face for the afternoon and even let them take a blood sample when they ask (they think your vitamin D is acting up, which - whatever).

You must put on a good face, or else they’re just relieved to have their floor back, because they agree to let you leave when you say you’re going home. You hug them goodbye, and walk to the end of the corridor before you let your smile drop.

You spend the night in the library, and if Danny knew she’d never let it go. But you’re not Danny’s responsibility any more, and anyway it’s not like you sleep. How much trouble can sneak up on you if you’re conscious and upright? It’s not as though the library staff are going to creep up behind you to inflict you with emotional problems. No, that danger is reserved for home.

 

* * *

 

Monday afternoon is your lit class, and you don’t want to go but your presentation is on Friday, and anyway your participation rate is getting dangerously low. You wait outside the lecture theatre with printouts of what you’ve been working on. You’d downloaded your texts to the library computers and re-prepared your notes rather than go home, and they’re more rushed than you’d like but you also remember the first time you prepared them all, so they’re not hopeless.

You’re waiting outside because you want to grab your group members and talk about the project with them before class, making sure that they’re both still available for after. And Kirsch is no trouble. He seems to balance out his bro-based approach to scholasticism by being genuinely willing to get involved, and when he sees you waiting at the door his first response is to join you.

“Hey, little hottie!” He greets cheerfully, setting down his bag by your feet. A near-bursting lever arch folder of notes is extending from the top, scrawled handwriting and highlighted pages visible.

“Hi, Kirsch. Do you mind waiting til SJ gets here? I want to just check we’re on the same page about meeting after class for our project.” You answer him, and you’ve got half his energy but your mind is buzzing all over your project.

“Sure!” He says, and then ducks to pull at the folder you’d seen a moment ago. “I actually had this excellent idea about how we could describe the relationship of the texts, like I thought we could talk about them as _Batman_ movie remakes, you know? Like how you have the originals and then all the remakes and each one uses a different actor and focusses on different stuff but it’s still the same underlying story?”

You can’t help it, you cringe as he pushes a page of notes under your nose. The folder is almost as big as you are.

“Um, but the Batman movies are all about Batman. _Foe_ is when you tell _Robinson Crusoe_ from someone else’s perspective -” You break off, because this isn’t the time to have this conversation. Inside, you can hear class starting. “Okay where is SJ?”

Kirsch shrugs, taking back his folder. “Dunno, but we better get in there, I don’t think our TA likes me.”

“Hmmm.”

You follow him in, and he’s right, Danny is already giving the both of you disapproving looks. You take the most easily available seats up the back of the room, and hope that they’ll let you see SJ arriving.

Between twitching and checking every time you hear the door open - and seriously, how often can a roomful of teenagers have someone leave to pee? - and your other troubles, you don’t take in a lot of the lecture. You’re distracted, thinking if you can go home after this, and if Carmilla misses you, and whether SJ will be ready for your meeting, and how you can talk Kirsch out of comparing _Robinson Crusoe_ to _Batman_ , for God’s sakes. Your professor is still talking about unreliable narrators, and you’ve already been over this, your essay is done and none of this will be relevant again until your final exam.

But it feels like you blink and then class is over, people around you packing up their notes and pens and talking about their weekends. You don’t know how long they’re at it before Kirsch nudges you, bringing you out of the daze you’d fallen into.

“She didn’t show, little L. What do you want to do, have our meeting anyway?”

“What?!”

You jump up, looking around the room. People have just started leaving, but you’re sure that SJ won’t be among them. Not when she’d set up this meeting between the three of you, when she’d been so unwilling to have Kirsch be responsible for any part of her grade. She has to be there. She has to be there, but you’ve frantically searched the room for any trace of her before you can recognise that she just didn’t show.

“No! She has to be here, we have this meeting!”

Your voice cracks, unexpectedly loud and carrying its shrill tone through the room. Heads turn, and you flush, but not before seeing Danny has yet to leave. She too is looking up at you.

“Dude, it’s okay,” Kirsch is saying. “Chill, we got this. SJ can just share her stuff with us later, I’ve got this wicked theme and we’ll -”

“Hang on,” you order him, and you clamber awkwardly over his knees in the fixed-seat rows. From there it’s only a dozen stairs before you arrive in front of Danny, who seems to be expecting you.

“Hello, Laura,” she says. She’s packing up her own materials, handouts and graded papers, and she doesn’t look at you. It’s such a change from when she used to be enthusiastic to see you, and it slows you a little in your headlong rush.

But only a little, because now you’re panicking.

“SJ isn’t here,” you say. “She hasn’t shown up and we have a group meeting, and - “

“Yeah, I know,” Danny interrupts. She’s still putting things into her bag, throwing them almost savagely. “I take attendance, remember.”

You shake your head, because of course she does, but you’re not getting through.

“Yes, but we have a group meeting for this project, and she hasn’t shown up and we need her and I don’t know what to do!”

“Did you try calling her?” Danny asks.

“No, she didn’t give us her number.” You have a thought, then. “Wait, you have everyone’s details - can I get her number from you? Please, Danny, I need her to help me with…”

You drift off, because Danny’s finally looked up and looking at you. But she’s shaking her head, slowly, and the look in her eyes is the furthest it’s ever been from where you want it to be.

“No, Laura. I can’t just give you her number,” she says, slow and biting. “There are privacy laws I have to follow, and I don’t have her consent. And I’m not going to break them because you yet again don’t have things together enough to actually complete a group project.”

You’re agape, horrified and staring at her. “Danny, I... “

 _I’m trying_.

She only shakes her head again, and if you weren’t reeling inside maybe you’d notice the way she looks exhausted, and beyond stressed.

“I am not about to break the rules for you again. Not when you didn’t even show up to class for weeks. And then you have the nerve to finally show up and then you actually fell asleep in class. For God’s sakes, Laura! When are you going to grow up and learn to solve your own problems?”

You think that if a whisper could contain a shout, this is what it would sound like. Around you, the next class is filing into the room, watching the two of you with curious eyes, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t hear any of them.

Kirsch appears at your side, taking your elbow and guiding you away. He’s booked a study room and he’s full of ideas and none of it matters in the slightest because all you can see is Danny’s face and the words she’d shouted.

_When are you going to learn to solve your own problems?_

 

* * *

 

When you let yourself back into your room, the air seems cold and stale. Something in the vicinity of your desk smells wrong and over-sweet, and when you hit the light switch, nothing happens. It doesn’t matter.

“Carm?” you ask. You’re hoping but not expecting. Hoping, hoping, but she doesn’t answer, and you aren’t surprised because when have you ever deserved her? You put your back against your front door and slide down it until your head is on your knees, and then you bang it against them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Danny is angry with you, and you’re going to fail your English class and your father is going to be ashamed of you, and Carmilla’s never going to speak to you again.

You’ll have to move back home, back in front of everyone who’ll know that you tried to get through university and failed. You’ll have to find a way to tell your father. You’ll have to find a way to tell Carmilla that you failed because you can’t keep it together well enough to attend classes and complete enough schoolwork to pass. You’ll have to tell Carmilla, brilliant, beautiful, bright, intelligent Carmilla, who does amazingly well without ever leaving her room, that you couldn’t pass first year English.

If she ever even speaks to you. If she ever even cares. You bang your face onto your knees again, and again, and then slam your head back into the door.

Because maybe she doesn’t, maybe she never gave a damn if you were there, if you passed, if you came, if you cared. Because she lied to you, you know she lied to you, you saw her and that other girl holding hands and she knew more about Carmilla than you ever have, she knew about her brother and her house and how Carmilla took her coffee, and you, you’re just a dumb teenager who happens to share her wall and her hometown. You’re just someone taking up her time, keeping her busy while she’s at school. She probably talks about you to that girl Ell, probably makes fun of you and your tv shows and your lousy grip on philosophy and your total inability to get _Lolita_. She probably came up with that poem Carmilla read you, probably laughed at how easily Carmilla could convince you to…

This time when your head hits the door, the noise is a _crack_! You close your eyes, open them again, can’t decide if the darkness is inside of you or out. The room seems to be pulsing with noise, every footstep in the hall and distant radio and common room conversation and crackling floorboard seeming to swell up to overwhelm you, no detail clear but all of it echoing, echoing, echoing in your ears and bouncing around your skull until it escapes from your mouth and your eyes in a hot mess that’s choking you. You cough and cough, gasping, gagging, throwing up the little food you’ve eaten today in a liquid white mess onto the carpet. It burns you coming out, and now you know you’re crying.

You’re sobbing, actually. Choking and gagging and deafened by the pounding of your heart in your eyes. Your temples, your jaw throbbing. Your heart is racing and you can feel it everywhere, bursting in your chest like it wants to escape from your skin and it isn’t until much, much, much later that you realise you’re screaming.

 

* * *

 

The hospital is a rush of cold air and white lights that glare into you. Voices speak over and around you, talking mouths that don’t seem to attach to faces or bodies. The world is black and white and echoey around you, hoving in and out.

You wake on your side in a hospital bed, the back of your head bandaged when you raise an encumbered hand to touch it. You stare at the IV in your right wrist and the bruises on your arm and you have a memory of movement, something that washes over you in waves and then recedes, but that’s all. You can’t add a face or time or place. 

When you try to roll over, you discover your left arm has been restrained to the bed, and it too is covered with bruises. You pull the velcro apart with clumsy fingers, expecting someone to try and stop you, but no one comes. You roll over, stitches in your head twinging, and curl down into a foetal position.

You wait.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am also [geoclaire on tumblr](https://www.geoclaire.tumblr.com)


	6. you’re made of memories you bury or live by

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where it all comes apart, comes out, and comes together.

The hospital is real. White walls and antiseptic smell, that astringent bleach that seems to cut into your nostrils and your brain. The lights that go off on schedule, and the lights on the machines that never go off at all. Those are unsettlingly real.

Silas’ sirens, though, and the mermaids in the lake the alchemy club and the cloud that ate October, the claims about the dean, and your belief that you were immune to moving traffic that one time… apparently those aren’t.

It takes until your fourth therapy session for all of this to come out. Because before that, well. You’d talked about them in passing, but really your focus was on this new place, and trying to raise your eyelids while they played with your dosages. And then there were plenty of other things to focus on: anorexic Devi, who swears he can stop, just as soon as he’s skinny enough that his boyfriend will take him back; Skylar who insists a squirrel lives inside her head; Victoria who can’t remember that people care about her unless they’re right in front of her. Beside all of that, your stories about Silas don’t seem exceptional to you.

But when you tell them in group, you see the way the others respond - the raised eyebrows, their skepticism - and for the first time you feel like you are one of them.

Apparently stories have always been told about Silas. But to everyone else, that’s all they were - stories. It’s only you that actually believes they’ve seen the mermaid’s teeth, the Dean’s blood deliveries, or the light that heralds the anglerfish moving and causes the localised earth tremors. Silas, explains Dr Brand, hasn’t had an earth movement since 1948, and that appeared to be the result of unexploded ordinance from the war.

You soak all of this in alongside the row of medication you now swallow every morning and night. The pills line up in a way that the facts don’t yet, and you stare down that queue like it’s going to explain something if only you look long enough. But the pills don’t talk, and you’re left wondering.

If the fish isn’t real, and neither are the sirens; if the Dean lives off food and not the tears of failing students; if the alchemy club doesn’t generate rain - if you only ask, will you learn that a girl on the other side of the wall, a girl that no-one but you had spoken to - a girl you’ve never laid eyes on, in a room that everyone believed was empty - if you find the will to ask, will you learn that she too is something you’ve invented?

You stare down your pills and you let the doctors play with the dosage and you talk to anyone who asks about anything they want, anything in the world except Carmilla.

 

 

(You have been wrong about so many things, so many friends and stories and seasons and patterns. You cannot bear to give up this last.)

 

 

They won't let you leave alone. And they're sending you home, but you beg and you plead and eventually your father gives way this far: If you will come home for the summer, and then the year, while they sort out your medication and get you ‘stable’, you can have one last night in your old room to pack your things and say your goodbyes. And you agree, you swear compliance, you freely accept his terms in exchange for this one thing, because you need, you _need_ , to know.

But someone needs to pick you up first, and once you stop and think, really think, the choice is obvious. And so Lola Perry collects you in a pale blue sedan that looks both twenty years old and as though it rolled off the line yesterday, the model ancient but the paint job immaculate. When you open the trunk, it’s lined with a picnic blanket, and you wonder if she wraps one over the car at night too. By comparison, you are beyond shabby in your borrowed scrubs, and you narrowly prevent yourself from dragging a corner of the blanket over your backpack. It contains nothing but your prescriptions and the clothes you came in wearing, and it looks sad in the corner of her car.

"Yes, of course," Lola is saying to Dr Brand. "The cafeteria is closed but I'll make her dinner myself."

"And check she takes her pills," Dr Brand advises. She gives you a sideways look, one you know well, and adds, "I know you haven’t been skipping, Laura, but it's easy to forget once you change your environment. I've forwarded your father your treatment plan; he'll be able to support you once you get home."

Sure. Because being discharged will be enough to let you forget all your hard won progress, the recognition that unmedicated your brain can’t keep a grip on what is and isn’t real. You don’t think you’ll forget that bitterest of pills, not soon.

Still you dredge up a smile and the doctor nods, apparently satisfied. Perry goes to the car, gesturing you to get in, and when you're inside and seat belted Dr Brand taps the roof with her hand and smiles her professional smile again.

"Drive safe!" She says, and you grip the edge of the seat lest she change her mind.

 

 

Back on campus Perry walks you all the way back to your apartment block, and then up the four flights of stairs to your room. You tried to dissuade her when she’d pulled up and parked the car instead of going, but she’d resisted your suggestion politely and then with a look you are coming to know well (one that says she is under directions other than your own wishes) and you stopped resisting. It’s easier that way, and you think maybe it’s even worth it when the worried lines smooth out of Perry’s face, although you still won’t answer when she asks if you met ‘anyone nice’. There’s cooperating and then there’s collaborating, and there are things you can’t yet bring yourself to do.

Still, credit where due. She leaves you at your door with a promise of bringing you by dinner, but then hovers at the end of the corridor.

“Lafontaine and I are both on campus for the night,” she blurts abruptly. “In case - you change your mind. You can reach us, just - just call or come by or, just, whenever you like. Alright? You’ll be fine, I know, but - just in case.”

She flounces away before you can come up with an adequate response. “Um, okay,” you say to her retreating back, and then you turn to your door. From the corner of your eye you see Carmilla’s, but you aren’t ready for that and turn your face away.

From habit you try to fumble in your pockets for your key, but the scrubs have no pockets and anyway you don’t know what has happened to half your things. You sigh, wishing Perry had stayed until you’d worked out a way inside, and bang your head against the door. It swings open at the touch.

Disbelieving, you push it further open, half expecting to find the room trashed and half your things gone. But you don’t, the room is cleaner and tidier than you’ve ever seen it, the window half open and the ever present scent of half decayed garbage entirely disappeared, and your clothing piled neatly into suitcases placed by your desk. And you’d assume it was Perry, but there’s one more new thing, and you stumble inside and close the door before you manage a word to the pale girl sitting crosslegged on the end of your bed.

“Carmilla,” you say.

 

 

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she says eventually.

Outside the drawn curtains of your window you can hear birds. Further away there are cars and trains, the distinctive whine of the brakes of the university bus doing one last round of leaving students. You’ve never been able to hear it so clearly, so used to the sounds of all your fellow students breathing and moving and orbiting through the pattern of their days around you.

Without the wall between you, Carmilla’s voice is lower and smokier than you had ever expected. She is soft when she lets words slide from her mouth, lining them up before you like an offering, hopeful and afraid.

“You were - panicking. Screaming, too, but that wasn’t - that didn’t scare me so much. It was your breathing, and that even when I tried talking, tried - calling out to you - you didn’t hear me.” She pauses, stopping to swallow, and you turn your back to the window. “I said I was sorry, Laura, but I didn’t know, I didn’t understand what was going on and why you were panicking. I thought it was me, at first, but then that didn’t make any sense. And then I thought you were hurt, and I, I, I tried to come to you. But I couldn’t, and you were hurting yourself, and I didn’t know who to call, so,” she shrugs. “I called Perry.”

“RA Perry to the rescue,” you say, and you want to be joking because it hurts to hear her hurt, but the ceiling is spinning and you are drifting.

Your meds often make you distant, dozy; the seroquel lets you sleep eight hours at night in what is apparently a normal way, but it leaves you hostile in the mornings and sleepy during the day.

Dr Brand swear it will get better, you’ll acclimatise, but you think that she likes this slower version of you, this slovenly thing weighed down by her own body so that you have to think ahead how to move and stand and catch yourself. It stops you running through the road because it stops you racing ahead in your thoughts, and you wonder how you are ever meant to complete school work again. How you are meant to write an essay or give a speech or drive a car when your reflexes are on another plane from your fingertips.

No wonder you are here when all the other students are gone; you cannot imagine how it would be possible to graduate when you feel this way. Dr Brand says it is normal, that you will come to recognise patterns and adjust, and you are so tired of Dr Brand you could choke.

You choose to look instead at Carmilla. She’s so very pretty, so much prettier in person than any of those photographs you ever saw on the internet, and you wonder how that can be true when she is as pale as a cloud and looks to have eaten nothing but her own fingernails for weeks.

“I thought it was Danny,” you confess, and then the words you’ve fumbled for run through you like water. “I was _so afraid,_ Carm. I thought you were angry, that you heard me and then you’d never speak to me again, and then - ” you shudder.

Your fear seems to have stolen your volume when you go on. You say, “They told me a lot of things weren’t real. In the hospital. And I didn’t believe that, because I knew about you, how you speak, how you sleep, how you sound when you sleep, you – I thought that for sure I knew you.

“But I had - nothing of yours, nothing you’d given me, only a thousand stupid photos and stories on a computer screen. And I realised they didn’t mean anything, because a million people could have those photos… And I was afraid, so afraid, that you weren’t real either, that you were one more thing I’d made up…”

You don’t know that you’re crying until you see that she is. Light from the window glances across the wet streaks on her cheeks, illuminating her lovely face and its wreckage, the long hair that she has drawn her fingers through until it curled and tangled, her crumpled black shirt advertising a band you know she’s never seen. Her hands knot in her lap, and then she’s standing up so very slowly.

She doesn’t approach you, only opens her hands, and you choke back a sob.

“Laura,” she says, full of regret and longing and _ache_ , and you stumble to her on disjointed feet and clumsy legs, your awkward body of chemical imbalance and slow reaction, and it doesn’t matter because she is here, she is finally here and she is perfect.

 

 

Her shoulder is wet beneath your cheek when you curl against her, your back to the wall in your narrow bed. It seems smaller this way, but then so does your room – you have spent so long unwillingly walking the corridors of the institute that you’ve become accustomed to its expanse, and your room is revealed for the tiny box that it has always been. You mind less about the bed, the way Carmilla’s presence is expressed as a weight and a pressure instead of the insistent belief that you were together.

“I met Elle through my philosophy course,” Carmilla says. Her arm is around you, a twig that folds across your shoulders, and you bury your nose against her neck and nod to encourage her. “This was… a couple years ago, I forget exactly. I was taking online courses to get my degree, at first just to have something to do, but then… I don’t know. I liked it. I was good at it, and my second semester I took more classes than before, and more philosophy especially.”

She shrugs, awkward under your weight, and you can hear how rarely she tells this story.

“Elle was in two of my classes. She was pretty – she actually used her photo as her ID, although most people didn’t – and that made her easy to remember. She stood out, even though she wasn’t always that good at the classes; she would argue with me all of the time. And at first it was annoying, because she would argue even when it was so blatantly obvious to me that she was wrong, but then – I don’t know, it was like I came to count on it. I started leaving posts that deliberately contradicted her, or held logical gaps, just to watch her react, and then I got used to expecting that no matter when or what I posted she would end up responding. And after a month or so she worked it out, and messaged me directly to give me grief about it. And so we started talking.”

She shifts again, her collarbone pressing against your forehead, and you lift yourself away for a moment because again the room is spinning, and you can’t tell if that’s the pills or the way you can feel her bones against your body, breathe smoke from within her clothes.

But when you look she is frowning, and you lower back against her, letting her scent and her story define your orbit.

“I didn’t go out then, either, but I wasn’t as bad in some ways as I am now. I couldn’t go new places, but I wasn’t as afraid of new people. And after we talked for months, and she said one day that she knew who I was but she’d never cared – she asked to meet me. And I said yes.

“Nothing happened, that first time. I don’t think we even touched, we just had coffee and argued about a book and insulted the guy running our course. And she made me laugh, and it had been so long, so damn long, since someone made me laugh. So of course I wanted to see her again, and she kept coming back. Weekly at first, and then maybe a couple times a week, and all the time she moved closer and then one day she kissed me. I panicked, because it had been years, but she said it was okay, we didn’t have to do that, and she didn’t mind if I was ace. That this was perfect.

“The next time she went home I went into my room and realised I was missing a picture of Will from my dresser. I wanted to be wrong, but…” she shrugs again, and it should make her loose but you can feel every tendon in her shoulder. “I got online and I googled her, and then her and my name. I’d googled her originally, of course, but all it told me was she wasn’t a journalist or a photographer, and I thought I was safe so I didn’t do it again. But now when I searched, I found she had a blog, and she had followers, and all she talked about was me and my family and our things. She had photos, too. Mostly the house, but some of me. A few of us. She said she was my girlfriend. And then the next week, because of the photos, someone believed her and they put her in their magazine, and suddenly it was everywhere.” She scoffs. “We only ever kissed _once_. And the next time she came over I threw her out of the house. Told her to consider us broken up.”

You turn in the circle of her arm, and look up at her. Curling into her has given you have the intimacy of your bodies without that of your eyes; you have heard her pain vibrate through her without putting a face to it. Letting her feel without the burden of your gaze or judgment, because the last month has taught you the weight of those.

But now that forbearance has become a barrier, and you twist against her, crawl higher on the bed, and she looks at you where you kneel over her.

“I didn’t lie to you, Laura. I’ve never done that,” she says. Pauses. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

You close your eyes, and you think about how our stories define us. How the words people say about us become who we are.

“I know that now.”

“Do you?”

Her presence is a balm, vindication and glory, but her pain cuts through you. Echoes through your veins in counterpoint to the heaviness of your heartbeat.

 

 

“I only ever wanted to protect you,” you say. “– I lied. Not to you but about you – so many times. And not like Elle, but to everyone else – I told them that you weren’t there, that I didn’t know you, that nothing was going on. That I didn’t know you. That you weren’t – mine.” You shake your head, letting your eyes open and reach past her to that still open window. It’s night still, although you think maybe there is the beginning of light on the horizon. You don’t have a lot of time. “I think maybe that’s why it was so easy to believe them. That you were one more thing in my head, a voice through the wall that was so exactly what I wanted – how could you possibly be real?”

She softens against you, and you want it to be enough. To finally know where you both are, where you stand, why you’ve told the stories that you have. But you lied, and you were wrong, and she deserves to hear it.

“I was always afraid of that, I think. And so when my father asked…” you shake your head again, helpless. “I was already reeling. Down the bottom of an internet black hole that fed every fear I had; everything from you not caring to all the horrors inflicted by the modern media. And so I said… that I wasn’t seeing someone.” You swallow. “I lied.”

You are too afraid to look at her. Too afraid that this at last is the thing that should have been untouched, the one thing left unsaid.

But then her hands are on your face, gentle and insistent as the tide, and you cannot resist meeting her eyes any more than you can resist gravity.

“You’re seeing me now,” she says, and you are, you are, you are, until you’re blinded again by tears.

 

 

She seems too fragile to kiss, too delicate to touch. But she cannot seem to take her hands from you, and she is too beautiful to deny, and so you trace her with heavy fingers and a lightened heart. She smells different than you ever imagined, sweetness edged by a hint of paper and cigarette smoke, and her bones seem to have been sung to the surface, pressing at the skin over her hips and cheekbones.

You let your hand sit there, on the curve of her waist, and you wonder if you’d felt this warmth - even once – if you would have believed so soon that your world was coming apart as you lost your grip on her. Because she stabilises you, holds your hips against hers when you shift in the narrow confines of the bed and balances the line of your shoulders with the weight of her arm around you.

“I’m not supposed to stay up all night,” you say, then reconsider. “I’m not supposed to stay up at all.”

Carmilla laughs, a little. “So your days of erratic sleeping are over? I didn’t know how you managed, cutie.”

It’s impossible to say if resentment or embarrassment is the greater reason when you scowl into the point of her shoulder. “Well. It turns out when everyone else said… that they stayed up all night writing papers, or studying... They were exaggerating.”

Her neck creases when she lowers her head to look at you. “You didn’t know?” she asks, and you shrug.

“Apparently routine is key to keeping me… stable. Not getting depressed, or manic. I need patterns, and then I won’t go… off-kilter.”

She raises her eyebrows, evaluating what you’re implying, but then she lets it go.

“So no more midnight recitals of _The Compass_?” she asks, and you blush clear to the middle of your chest before you sober, looking up at her.

“No. At least, not here.”

She hums deep in her throat, and reaches out to smooth your hair back from your face where it’d swung forward when you raised yourself up. Her fingers are cool on your cheek, her look tender, and it makes your heart hurt that you have to make her understand.

“But Carm - it’s not just that. Not just sleep and food, that stuff. There’s - well - pills. Medication, I mean, and I have to go to two different types of therapy, and just - stability needs to be a thing for me. Like getting out of the hospital was one thing but now I need to work on things for myself, and no one thinks I can do that here, not when I’m studying. And my Dad - God, my Dad. My crazy overprotective father has just learned his only daughter has bipolar disorder and needs support to get through it and you can just imagine - I have to go home. He wants to take care of me for a while, and I’m pretty sure that means I won’t be coming back. Not next year, anyway.”

You look down, because you don’t have it in you to watch her face when you tell her. Too full of shame and regret, too full of pain. You are a girl who couldn’t tell what was real, and now you are a girl who needs a world of therapy and medication. Periodic reality checks and your father’s supervision. You can’t look at her and the irony of it is painful. Because for so long you couldn’t see her because of the wall, and then because you didn’t believe in her, and now when you can finally see her lovely face you are the one who is driving you, holding you apart. The distance between you no longer physical but somehow more necessary. You pick at the coverlet by your knee on the bed.

But her fingers are still on your cheek, warming against your skin, and she uses them to raise your eyes once more. Hers are dark and cool, and you bite your lip to hold back your tears.

“My college experience isn’t quite what I’d expected,” she says. “Not quite what anyone planned. My psychiatrist really thought I’d get out more if I was surrounded by my peers, somewhere that not everyone knew the story… that hasn’t really panned out.”

Her fingers are gentle when she slides them from your cheek to beneath your ear, her thumb caressing skin as her fingers sink into your hair. It’s lovely, loving, and somehow still not as gentle as her voice. It’s the softest you have ever heard from her, cautiously building words like a bridge between you. Offering you forgiveness for all the things you haven’t done and can’t do, and when you blink this time your tears spill down your cheek.

“I’m sorry,” you say, and she shakes her head.

“No, Laura, you don’t understand. I’m sorry, so sorry that I didn’t understand and help you sooner - but for me, this has been - sort of, well, the closest I could get to what a college experience is meant to be like. I didn’t - I’ve barely spoken to anyone who wasn’t my course coordinators or a delivery boy, I haven’t gone out. Except to call Perry. And then here, for you.”

She pauses, and you freeze. Letting her feel her way again, the best that you can. Finding a way forward.

“What I’m saying… the only times I did what I was meant to do here was when it involved you,” she says. “So for me… I guess it doesn’t really matter where I am, not when I don’t, don’t go out anyway.”

She looks at you again, and you look back. You’re not getting it, and she blows a hasty breath upwards to send her hair fluttering up from her face, and tries again.

“What I’m trying to say is that I can pursue my education anywhere. Including. Um, back home.”

She peers at you then, anxious through the weight of her eyelashes. Chewing at her lip, fingers stilling in your hair. And your mouth falls open when you finally understand what she is trying to say. This one important message surpassing all barriers.

“I could… I could come and see you there,” you offer. Trying to reach out as gently as she has to you. “If you wanted.”

She bites her lip, still looking at you through her lashes. Then she raises her head, and nods.

“I do. I want that, Laura.” She pauses, and the hand still in your hair begins to move again, stroking you so very, very softly. “Do you not know I love you?”

“I do,” you say, and tears run down your cheeks without restriction now. Because no matter the distance and the doubts and the fear, this you did know. You do. That this was what you were always afraid of losing, to the world or to lies or to the manipulations of your own brain. But she says it, and the too loud world stops its violent spinning for a moment.

You lean in, touching her forehead, her nose, her lips with yours. Wet and salt streaked and dry and damaged and somehow perfect in this single moment.

“I love you too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you. All of you. This has been a hell of a labour of love, and I wouldn't have gotten here if you hadn't cared as much as you did.
> 
> Last time: I'm [geoclaire on tumblr](https://www.geoclaire.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me at geoclaire.tumblr.com.
> 
> Oh! Quick request. If you want to click kudos but you already have, can you leave a comment below instead? One word or one letter is fine! Just helps me gauge if y'all are still enjoying this. Cheers bellas!


End file.
